Comments on OpenOffice.org Ninja: Backreferences in replacements

Orn: No, the year remains in YYYY, 4-digit format,...

2008-04-17T12:56:00.000-06:00

Orn: No, the year remains in YYYY, 4-digit format, so the first example just shuffles the locations and changes the delimiters. However, I updated the article to be a little more clear.

In your first example, doesn't the example have th...

2008-04-15T15:19:00.000-06:00

In your first example, doesn't the example have the stated goal of changing the year to 2 digits YY from original 4 digits YYYY? (besides changing year location)?

D'oh! This is pretty clear from the title of the a...

2008-02-11T02:06:00.000-07:00

D'oh! This is pretty clear from the title of the article - I should have spotted it, sorry. Many thanks for taking the time to respond.

Dan,You need OpenOffice.org 2.4 which is due as a ...

2008-02-07T07:03:00.000-07:00

Dan,

You need OpenOffice.org 2.4 which is due as a final release March 2008. Until then, you can test the unstable developer's snapshot.

Andrew

Even with "Regular expressions" checked, my backre...

2008-02-07T04:54:00.000-07:00

Even with "Regular expressions" checked, my backreferences are treated as literals. For example, cell contains "foobar", search is "(foobar)", replace is "$1"; this gives me "$1" in the cell _not_ "foobar".

I am familiar with regex but not OpenOffice - I guess I am missing a trick somewhere. Have you come across this behaviour before?

(OOO 2.3.0 on Fedora Core 7)

Anonymous,I could see how that is confusing. The ...

2008-01-24T19:56:00.000-07:00

Anonymous,

I could see how that is confusing. The $1 refers to the first group in parenthesis. There is only one group, so $1 is correct.

If the search expression were ([0-9]{3})-([0-9]{2})-([0-9]{4}) the replacement could be XXX-XX-$3 and produce the same results.

I did forget the closing parenthesis, so I'm glad you encouraged me to take another look.

Andrew

Looking at your two examples would the 'replace' i...

2008-01-24T18:15:00.000-07:00

Looking at your two examples would the 'replace' in the "Redacting the SSN" be XXX-XX-$3 instead of XXX-XX-$1 ??