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

Nothing, which it did (aka deleted it).
On Feb 20, 2016 8:52 AM, "Brian Barker" <b.m.barker@btinternet.com> wrote:

> 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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