Comments on OpenOffice.org Ninja: Example regular expressions for Writer

Regarding the double newlines, or the empty paragr...

2008-06-30T19:50:00.000-06:00

Regarding the double newlines, or the empty paragraph.
In my text, removing the empty paragraph won't work, because it eliminates the format information of the next line...

end of prev paragaraph.new paragraph
new paragraph
HEADING 2

- would end up as ... -

end of prev paragaraph.new paragraph
heading 2 with default format

heading 2 would actually be stripped off its heading formatting and document hierarchy.

Such an everyday task, do we have to do it by hand?

Interesting article, thanks for all.

2008-06-10T08:42:00.000-06:00

Interesting article, thanks for all.

To the Anonymous commenter regarding replacing bla...

2008-05-13T21:22:00.000-06:00

To the Anonymous commenter regarding replacing blank lines....

Remember that paragraphs are single lines in Writer (or any Word Processor, for that matter), so the caret (beginning of line) and DollarSign (End of Line) combo (^$) is a blank line, not just a blank paragraph as indicated in the blog entry above.

You then want to repeat it (because the RegEx in Writer doesn't have {min,max} features) with a backreference ( use "$1"), with a plus-sign, since you want at least one (contrast this with the asterisk/star ("*") which matches zero or more.

You'll want something like:

(^$)$1+ as your seaerch pattern.

I read dozens of pages in forums and did not find ...

2008-04-08T08:32:00.000-06:00

I read dozens of pages in forums and did not find a so natural thing:
how can one
automatically replace all double blanc lines by a single blank line.
(If configured correctly, whil also
change a triple repetition of a blank line into a single blanc line).

Something so easy in emacs and so difficult in OOW.