libre office macro find replace formatted text

Question

I want to go through a document and find all center aligned text and delete it, I can setup formatted text on the find and replace tool, but when I record, it doesn't save formatting... does anyone know how to edit the basic code to do this? also is the open office documentation compatible with libre office.

Answer 1

Recording in OpenOffice generates dispatcher code, which usually isn't very good. It's better to use the UNO API when writing macros. Here is some code that does what you want:

Sub DeleteCenteredLines
    oDoc = ThisComponent
    Dim vDescriptor, vFound
    ' Create a descriptor from a searchable document.
    vDescriptor = oDoc.createSearchDescriptor()
    ' Set the text for which to search and other 
    With vDescriptor
      .searchString = ""
      .searchAll=True
    End With
    Dim srchAttributes(0) As New com.sun.star.beans.PropertyValue
    srchAttributes(0).Name = "ParaAdjust"
    srchAttributes(0).Value = com.sun.star.style.ParagraphAdjust.CENTER
    vDescriptor.SetSearchAttributes(srchAttributes())
    ' Find the first one
    vFound = oDoc.findFirst(vDescriptor)
    Do While Not IsNull(vFound)
        vFound.setPropertyValue("ParaAdjust", com.sun.star.style.ParagraphAdjust.LEFT)
        oTC = oDoc.Text.createTextCursorByRange(vFound)
        oTC.gotoStartOfParagraph(false)
        oTC.gotoEndOfParagraph(true)
        oTC.String = ""
        oTC.goRight(1,true)
        oTC.String = ""
        vFound = oDoc.findNext( vFound.End, vDescriptor)
    Loop
End Sub

Check out http://www.pitonyak.org/AndrewMacro.odt for examples of many common tasks. In my experience, looking for examples in this document is usually easier than trying to record macros and make sense of what was recorded.

This works for OpenOffice as well as LibreOffice. Generally the API is the same for both.