I love LibreOffice / OpenOffice, but some tasks we cannot do in it, like mentioned in this question title: search and replace special characters in Writer. Someone does know how to do that?

You can do that tasks in MS Word (for instance, search for "^p", that is tabulation, and replace it with "^t", paragraph mark).

Also, you can do that also in Notepad++ (in showed example, using "\n" and "\p").

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

Edit #1:

With tabulation mark functions, searching for \t functions.

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

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

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The $ sign will search for a paragraph mark, but not replace with one. – Chris Davies Jan 23 at 20:40
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up vote 3 down vote accepted

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

enter image description here

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

http://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

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but what about paragraphs, line breaks...? – kokbira Jun 17 '11 at 14:18
Try the regex expressions like \n – Linker3000 Jun 17 '11 at 18:45
With tabulation mark functions, but paragraph or line breaks it does not. I've already tried \r, \n, \r\n, \n\r, ^p, ^l... – kokbira Jun 17 '11 at 18:54
I.e., it is impossible to do a single search for paragraph marks :( You can search for line breaks "shift+enter" (or a <br> in html) with "\n". You can search for a text in a beginning of a paragraph, like "^thing" will search for a text "thing" that is in beginning of a paragraph. But paragraph mark no! :( Think that: I have a long text and I want to change all occurrences of "two enters" (not "shift-enter") with "one enter" (not "shift-enter"). How to do that? In MS Word, it's only replace of "^p^p" with "^p"... – kokbira Jun 17 '11 at 20:25
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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.

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