How to reformat text ignoring explicit line breaks in OpenOffice?

Question

Quite often I find myself inserting text files in OpenOffice Writer documents, then spending inordinate amounts of time reformatting the result. The problem is that those text files contain newlines, which OOWriter then uses to force a line break. Therefore, I get this:

aa bb cc dd ee
ff
gg hh ii jj kk
ll mm

when I'd rather have the whole paragraph properly formatted:

aa bb cc dd ee ff gg
hh ii jj kk ll mm

Is there a (preferably easy) way to reformat the text to achieve this result?

EDIT:

Here's a reproducible example:

123 121 21 23232 2323 232 23232 2332 23 22332 3 22 2 323 23232 23232 23 323 23232  sds sfsdfs sdfs sfsdfs
3232 232 223 23232 22323 23 23232 2323 23232 2 2 sdsd sdad asdasas adsada adasda adassda fsdfs sfsdf sfsdfs
adsaa dasa addasadaa adasads adas das adas as d a das ad a dsa da sd ad sad asasasd asds sfdfds sfsfsd
hfghfg fghfhg fhfgh fhgfh fhfgf fhghf fh fgh fg hfg hfg hfghrttyhfg  fhfh hf h f hg f hffg dfs sdfsfwet ytyt

Since there are no empty lines, I consider this text to be single paragraph. But if I insert or paste this content into a new empty document in OOWriter-3.3, I get this:

123 121 21 23232 2323 232 23232 2332 23 22332 3 22 2 323 23232 23232 23 323 23232  sds sfsdfs 
sdfs sfsdfs
3232 232 223 23232 22323 23 23232 2323 23232 2 2 sdsd sdad asdasas adsada adasda adassda fsdfs
sfsdf sfsdfs
adsaa dasa addasadaa adasads adas das adas as d a das ad a dsa da sd ad sad asasasd asds sfdfds sfsfsd
hfghfg fghfhg fhfgh fhgfh fhfgf fhghf fh fgh fg hfg hfg hfghrttyhfg  fhfh hf h f hg f hffg dfs sdfsfwet 
ytyt

Is there an automatic way to restructure the flow of text so that all lines are filled properly?

Answer 1

I found a partial solution:

• Mark the text
• Select Find & Replace
• Enable regular expressions from the More Options menu
• In Search for: enter a single $
• Leave Replace with: empty
• Press Replace All

This will remove all explicit newlines - not exactly what I want but very close.