Re: [libreoffice-users] regex help

On 1/3/2021 4:09 PM, Brian Barker wrote:
> At 14:19 03/01/2021 -0500, William Noname wrote:
> > I have a script that mysteriously became double spaced. I want 
> > to search for 2 end of paragraph marks and replace them with one.
>
> So it's the paragraphs that are spaced, not lines (the usual 
> meaning of "double-spaced")?

Yes, I do mean lines are double spaced, but...

I can't do what I want to do in my programming editor and when I 
read the script into LO the line endings are suppressed and each 
line is treated as a paragraph.

> > I can do a regex search for $ and find them all, but $$ finds 
> > none - I presume there is something between them that does not 
> > show as a formatting mark.
>
> You are labouring under the common misapprehension that the 
> pilcrow that indicates the presence of a paragraph break has an 
> actual presence in the document; no: think of it merely as the 
> indicator that it is. And you think that the $ symbol matches 
> this; also no.
Thank you.
> > I don't want to remove all blank lines, just the ones that 
> > have a blank line following.
>
> In other words you want to remove blank empty *paragraphs*.


Yes, but I have intentional blank lines that I do not want to remove.

> > What is the regex for a paragraph mark in replace?
>
> There isn't one. Instead, the $ symbol merely locks your 
> pattern, whatever it is, so that it will match only something 
> that occurs at the end of a paragraph.
>
> > Or, any other suggestions.
>
> Don't think of searching for paragraph breaks, which you cannot 
> do. Instead, search for the empty paragraphs that you wish to 
> delete. They contain nothing, so the pattern you need is also 
> nothing. But you need to arrange that it matches nothing only 
> if that nothing occurs at the beginning of a paragraph and at 
> the same time at the end of a paragraph. The symbol for locking 
> to the start of a paragraph is the caret, "^", so the pattern 
> you should search for is "^$" (no quotes, of course) - 
> replacing with nothing.
Is there a way to select a paragraph followed by an empty paragraph?
> I trust this helps.
>
> Brian Barker

--
Bill Drescher
william {at} TechServSys {dot} com


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