Contents

# Using Regular Expressions in Text Searches

Regular expressions are special patterns used to find and manipulate text, helping you locate specific information within texts.

Searching with regular expressions is different from searching with wildcards. LibreOffice Writer only supports searching with regular expressions.

You can use regular expressions when you find and replace text in a document. For example, "s.n" finds "sun" and "son".

1. Choose Edit - Find & Replace.

2. Click More Options to expand the dialogue.

3. Select the Regular expressions check box.

4. In the Find box, type the search term and the regular expression(s) that you want to use in your search.

5. Click Find Next or Find All.

## Regular Expression Examples

1. The regular expression for a single character is a period (.).

2. The regular expression for a word character \w, and \d for a decimal digit.

3. The regular expression for zero or more occurrences of the previous character is an asterisk. For example: "123*" finds "12" "123", and "1233".

4. The regular expression to search for zero or more occurrences of any character is a period and asterisk (.*).

5. The regular expression for one or more occurrences of the previous character is a plus sign (+). For example: "\w+" finds any word, "\d+" any number.

6. The regular expression for a tab character is \t. More generally, \s stands for all kinds of "spaces", like non-breaking space, carriage return ...

7. The regular expression for the end of a paragraph is a dollar sign ($). The regular expression for the start of a paragraph is a caret and a period (^.). The regular expression for an empty paragraph is ^$.

8. When using regular expressions, you can insert Unicode characters in the replacement string using \uhhhh (4 hex digits) or \Uhhhhhhhh (8 hex digits) which will be expanded into their respective characters during the replacement.

A search using a regular expression will work only within one paragraph. That is, a \n will match a line break within a paragraph.

Related Topics

List of Regular Expressions

Removing Line Breaks

Using Wildcards in Formulas

Please support us!