Re: [libreoffice-users] Replacing the first character, did I stumble onto the right answer

At 06:19 20/02/2016 -0700, John Meyer wrote:
> I was trying to find a way to find and replace the beginning single 
> tick in a column of cells, ...

Replace with what, pray?

> ... and out of frustration and trying to set up step one in a longer 
> scheme of steps, I tried this:
> Find
> ^.
> Replace
> &
>
> It seemed to work instantly for some unknown reason. Exactly what did I do?

You must have had "Regular expressions" ticked. With that setting, 
the dot in the "Search for" box matches any single character and the 
circumflex requires the match to occur at the beginning of a 
paragraph. So yes; this will match the first character of each 
paragraph in the range. The ampersand in the "Replace with" box 
inserts a copy of the string that was matched by the search criterion 
- so here it will simply replace the matched text with what you had 
before. This will have no effect, of course - unless you have chosen 
to modify the attributes or the format of the string, in which case 
this technique can be very useful.

I trust this helps.

Brian Barker


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