How to find and replace special formats in word processors?

Question

Currently I have Word 2010 and Word 2013 Preview (and OpenOffice 3, LibreOffice + LyX 2) installed.

And I want to do this: I have long document full of content that is sadly broken down by paragraphs, while I need/want to have no paragraphs, but the content in one line each, separated by spaces or commas.

Now I found out that Word has "Special characters" that I can set as a variable in the "Find and Replace" options, but it just doesn't work! I also tried to put a wildcard ("^?") in front of the "^v", but it doesn't work either. It doesn't find a single paragraph break. Please see this screenshot, this is the config I tried:

The result should simply look like e.g. this: "IMF (Hg.) 2003 – Annex A Anzahl Seiten: 2"

According to Microsoft it should just work.

If I could achieve this in OpenOffice or LibreOffice I would be fine with that too of course!

But I checked both and couldn't even find such an option in their "Search and Replace" menu.

What can I do to solve this problem?

Please forgive me if I should've chosen the wrong terms, as you can see my MS Word is in German.

Answer 1

Replace all ^p with a simple space (i.e. " " without the quotes).

If any line breaks remain, also replace all ^l (that's a lower-case L) with a single space.

Note: If your paragraphs have multiple blank lines in between, you might want to first replace ^p^p with a single ^p repeatedly till no more substitution is possible, then replace the single ^p instances that remain with spaces as mentioned above.