[Wylug-help] OpenOffice Regular Expression Search and Replace

[Dave Fisher]

On Thu, May 31, 2007 at 09:47:10AM +0100, Smylers wrote:
> Mark Randall writes:
> 
> > In the replace part of the search box, you can specify an ampersand
> > (&) to insert what was matched in the regular expression -
> 
> Ah yes; I obviously missed this (and \1 and friends) before sending my
> recent mail.  

Me too, hence the mistaken inference at the bottom of my reply to your
mail.

> It was the fact that & appears in a list of regular
> expression characters, despite clearly not being one, which meant I
> didn't find it!

Perhaps the OO documentation team had the same misapprehension as me?
;-)

Or maybe they just chose to gloss over the distinction in order to
package all the related stuff in one 'reference card' type table? ...
like my brain appears to have done ;-)

> > and I've managed to change the case by using the font effects option -
> 
> Note that that doesn't actually change the text's case, it merely
> formats it in the specified case -- so the underlying character is still
> an "A", but is being displayed as "a".  So if, for example, you copy and
> paste the text to a text editor, thereby losing the formatting, the
> native case shows.

Yep, that's a bit of a show-stopper for what I had in mind.

The menu option (Format > Change Case) solves the immediate casing
problem, but it would be nice to have a more generic/low-level approach
to transliteration ... or have I missed one that's already there?

Dave