Regular Expressions option Libreoffice Calc 5.1.1.2
FYI. This spreed sheet is used between 2 computers. one with Windows 10\MSOffice 365 and the other Mint linux 17.3\Libreoffice 5.1.1.2
Is there a way to keep the “enable regular expressions in formulas” option enabled as a default option?
-Julian
Would you (surf637) enlighten me concerning the question what led you to that statement?
I am using regular expressions frequently with Calc functions and with ‘F & R’ in Calc and in Writer.
But: I do not keep documents filed in alien formats. This is known to cause a lot of problems. One of the them seems to be that MS are using their own variant of RegEx together with their own RegEx engine. Anybody getting an XLSX file should expect that the contained formulae and the contained results comply with MS’ own standards. Open documents should be expected to use an open RegEx engine. I am not an expert concerning RegEx software. I thus looked for related information. This wikipedia page seems to contain at least some basics. Concerning LibO I was told once that it is using the ICU RegEx engine. Of course we have to expect some restrictions, in specific when RegEx are used with Calc functions.
Subtleties aside, the keypoint I wanted to stress was that the file format specifications for XLSX (there are variants again) are made to get a persistent representation of Excel documents reviving the original document when opened. The same for ods and Calc. There is no exact mapping of the documents of the one class to files of types specified for the other class. If I am correctly informed also MS did not manage up to date a complete mapping of their documents to odf formats despite the fact that tey at least pretended to try.
Very valuable information with respect to the file-format-issue you will find here.
Unfortunately, Autohotkey is a Window-only program.
Calc can use Regular expressions, but the User can decide to avoid it. One of the Problems – especcially, if you are not used to handle it – is the special meaning of quite often used CHARs like $ () and . in regular expressions.
I often have to search for 5-digit sequences in paranthesis like (12345), where I like to ignore the special meaning of () in regular expressions. Otherwise I´d have to write \(12345\) for the same term.
But sometimes I have to reformat a text and remove every tab before one of these numbers:
Search \t(\([:digit:]{5}\)) and replace by $1
So it is useful to have an option to switch. In search and replace there is a checkbox to do this, and there is also a
general option (per file saved?) to allow these patterns as argument for calc-functions.
To the first question: If Excel is not using the same standard of regexp (and my guess is MS was always inventing own stuff), then it is nearly impossible to convert patterns. So LO-pattern-settings wouldn´t work in excel-files.
Same problem as converting BASIC-Macros…
Joern
You surely are aware of the fact that MS is using a different variant (a different engine, a different syntax) of Regular Expressions. Anything relying on the evaluation of RegEx in expressions in Calc may therefore not work or (worse) may work but return different results under Excel.
Currently installed: LibO V5.1.2 on Windows 10
Maybe we might! (Create a powerful UFO: United Free Office!) Lupp from München