How to insert line break into Word (docx) document using OpenXMLPowerTools?

Question

I'm writing a library which generates Word documents based on a template. Some text needs to be replaced with another text. Everything seems to be working, there is a TextReplacer class which may perform replacements.

The things become worse when I need to replace a single-line part of text with multiline text. Line breaks such as \n or \r\n are just pasted as text. I understand that this is expected as multiple lines of text must become separate tags (<w.p>..</w.p>, I suppose) in document.xml.

I think that simple solution is to replace all \n or \r\n in document with break tags before saving. I can do this with string.Replace(), but I don't think it is the best way to go. I want to use some built-in OpenXMLPowerTools library features, if it is possible. Or maybe other (free) OpenXML libraries.

Im not sure if this is any help http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2871887/inserting-newlines-in-word-using-openxml — NickOS, Apr 24 '15 at 06:12
@NickRobins, yes, it might be the solution, but not a built-in functionality. I might perform replacement by hand, I'm just afraid it will fall with large amounts of text. — Anton Papin, Apr 24 '15 at 06:21

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 01 '15 at 06:57

I ended up with this:

public static void ReplaceNewLinesWithBreaks(XDocument xDoc)
{
    var textWithBreaks = xDoc.Descendants(W.t).Where(t => t.Value.Contains("\\r\\n"));
    foreach (var textWithBreak in textWithBreaks)
    {
        var text = textWithBreak.Value;
        var split = text.Replace("\\r\\n", "\\n").Split(new[] {"\\n"}, StringSplitOptions.None);

        textWithBreak.Value = string.Empty;
        foreach (var s in split)
        {
            textWithBreak.Add(new XElement(W.t, s));
            textWithBreak.Add(new XElement(W.br));
        }
        textWithBreak.Descendants(W.br).Last().Remove();
    }
}

Which may be also rewritten as helper method.

But, it would be great if someone from OpenXmlPowerTools team will write an overload to TextReplacer which would accept IEnumerables for replacement.

How to insert line break into Word (docx) document using OpenXMLPowerTools?

1 Answers1