How to search and replace for special characters in LibreOffice / OpenOffice Writer?

Question

I love LibreOffice / OpenOffice, but some tasks cannot be done in it, such as is mentioned in this question's title, to search and replace for special characters in Writer. Does anyone know how to do this?

This can be done with MS Word (for instance, searching for the paragraph mark "^p", and replace it with a tabulation "^t").

This can also be done in Notepad++ (in given example, using "\n" and "\t").

But in Writer, although there is the option "regular expressions", I cannot search for special characters with it - I always have to copy+paste text to MS Word/Notepad++, do what I want and copy+paste back to Writer...

Edit #1: for the tabulation mark it works when searching for \t.

What about with paragraph marks or line breaks? It does not seem to . I've already tried \r, \n, \r\n, \n\r, ^p, ^l...

Edit #2: Almost solved by @Linker3000, but what about paragraph marks?

Answer 1

You can certainly use regular expressions in LibreOffice 3.4 as I have just tried it:

There's a fuller list of what can and can't be used here:

https://help.libreoffice.org/Common/List_of_Regular_Expressions

Edit: There's some comments on how to deal with paragraph marks here:

http://www.oooninja.com/2007/12/example-regular-expressions-for-writer.html

Answer 2

Even better (in my opinion) to do it with AltSearch. See this post. In the GUI of AltSearch You'll easily find codes all the non-printing chars and much more.

Answer 3

As mentioned by Linker3000, you can search using regular expressions in LibreOffice Writer. This will allow you to find special characters.

The missing piece to Linker300's answer is specifically how to find paragraph markers. The trick is to use LibreOffice's regex functionality to search for $. In regex, $ means "end of line", which is exactly what we want. Thanks to user114967 for the tip.