data conversion strangeness

[Alex Dean]

On Jun 16, 2006, at 9:08 AM, Craig White wrote:

> On Fri, 2006-06-16 at 12:03 -0400, A LeDonne wrote:
>> On 6/16/06, Craig White <craigwhite at azapple.com> wrote:
>>> I only brought in Notepad.exe because of something that I can't  
>>> explain
>>> within openoffice.org... I could use regular expressions to use  
>>> "\n" as
>>> a [return/linefeed] in OOo's 'Replace' but couldn't figure out  
>>> how to
>>> 'Find' "\n" - I finally gave up. It does have a really nice  
>>> feature '^$'
>>> to find blank lines though so I had to shift my thinking and now  
>>> I am
>>> working.
>>>
>>> Craig
>>
>> Another option (though I understand that you're past this): I was  
>> able
>> to use $ by itself to match line endings in OOo's Replace with RegEx.
> ----
> duh - that was an important piece of info there...I guess that's why I
> asked/responded as I did because I was frustrate at not being able to
> 'find' the line ending but able to 'replace' with them.

^, $, etc. are position assertions rather than characters.  They seem  
similar to things like \n or \r, but they're not.  Various editing  
tools seem to handle attempts to find/replace the positions in non- 
intuitive ways, at least as I've seen.

I always thought '^$' would find all blank lines, but in some  
programs it finds nothing at all, because blank lines have a newline  
character, so you have to use '^\n$' as the regular expression.

I'm pretty sure you'll get more predictable results if you always  
include some real characters.  An expression built only out of  
positional assertions will be a frustrating little beast.  (That's  
how it was for me, anyway.)

alex
.