Apache OpenOffice (AOO) Bugzilla – Issue 63074
In find dialog, provide a wizard for composing regular expressions
Last modified: 2013-02-07 22:37:21 UTC
In the find dialog, provide a pulldown of non-visible characters such as line break, paragraph break, page break, section break, non-breaking hyphen etc. Many users of a word processor may like to do their work without having to learn RegEx. Besides requiring RegEx, the find and replace function also seems to contain some mysterious methods: Although I know RegEx, I couldn't fathom the logic behind searching for /n and replacing with /n (it works, of course, but I could not have thought of this solution by myself). MS Word has a pulldown menu for all such characters. Then it puts a combination like ^i and ^l in the field and goes ahead with the search. I tried to enter those combinations in Writer, but it does not work.
according to http://qa.openoffice.org/issue_handling/workflowcharts/ RFE_issues_by_QA.sxd I reassign this issue to requirements and set the status to New
(raindrops, if you do not mind I will enhance your RFE a bit) Dear developers, we already have "Special characters" dialog in "Search and Replace". I suggest adding list of common regular expressions, so that when clicked it would generate proper regex for user. This would greatly flatten learning curve for new users and help user learn regex syntax.
(Making sure raindrops as original poster is in CC).
Thanks kpalagin, but I monitor all my 260+ issues, so I don't need the CC. I would actually recommend a RegEx builder wizard. There are a lot of stand-alone RegEx builders. We also see them in mass renamers. Here are some examples for getting the general idea: http://www.regexbuddy.com/create.html http://silveragesoftware.com/rxl.html# http://www.renschler.net/RegexBuilder/
raindrops, please see if your issue 63074 is dup of earlier http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=28913. Don't judge just by summary, but by SBA's comments.
kpalagin, That bug does describe what I started out with; namely a pull-down list of special characters like MS Word. But in both the discussion has veered towards RegEx. These subjects are different in terms of implementation, so they better be raised in separate issues. So I suggest we turn this bug into a full-fledged RFE for RegEx wizard ONLY (per my last post), and drop the original request for "pull-down menu for special character". I have changed the summary. Also change the other bug's summary to let it be what the proposer wanted originally (namely, a pull-down of special characters). In that case both are not duplicates. Note that I am asking for a RegEx wizard, not a pull-down menu, because there is no point in watering down a powerful technique like RegEx with a pull-down menu. So if the other bug wants a pulldown for special characters AND RegEx, so be it.