how to tokenize/parse/search&replace document by font AND font style in LibreOffice Writer?

Question

I need to update a bilingual dictionary written in Writer by first parsing all entries into their parts e.g.

• main word (font 1, bold)
• foreign equivalent transliterated (font 1, italic)
• foreign equivalent (font 2, bold)
• part of speech (font 1, italic)

Each line of the document is the main word followed by the parts listed above, each separated by a space or punctuation.

I need to automate the process of walking through the whole file, line by line, and place a delimiter between each part, ignoring spaces and punctuation, so I can mass import it into a Calc file. In other words, "each part" is a sequence of character (ignoring spaces and punctuation) that have the same font AND font-style.

I have tried the standard Search&Replace feature, and AltSearch extension, but neither are able to complete the task. The main problem is I am not able to write a search query that says:

Find: consecutive characters with the same font AND font_style, ignore spaces and punctuation

Replace: term found above + "delimiter"

Any suggestions how I can write a script for this, or if an existing tool can solve the problem?

Thanks!

Pseudo code for desired effect:

var delimiter = "|"

Go to beginning of document

While not end of document do:
     var $currLine = get line from doc
     var $currChar = get next character which is not space or punctuation;
     var $font = currChar.font
     var $font_style - currChar.font_style (e.g. bold, italic, normal)

     While not end of line do:
         $currChar = next character which is not space or punctuation;

          if (currChar.font != $font || currChar.font_style != $font_style) { // font or style has changed
               print $delimiter

               $font = currChar.font
               $font_style - currChar.font_style (e.g. bold, italic, normal)
          }
     end While

end While

Answer 1

Here are tips for each of the things your pseudocode does.

First, the easiest way to move line by line is with the TextViewCursor, although it is slow. Notice the XLineCursor section. For the while loop, oVC.goDown() will return false when the end of the document is reached. (oVC is our variable for the TextViewCursor).

Get each character by calling oVC.goRight(0, False) to deselect followed by oVC.goRight(1, True) to select. Then the selected value is obtained by oVC.getString(). To ignore space and punctuation, perhaps use python's isalnum() or the re module.

To determine the font of the character, call oVC.getPropertyValue(attr). Values for attr could simply be CharAutoStyleName and CharStyleName to check for any changes in formatting.

Or grab a list of specific properties such as 'CharFontFamily', 'CharFontFamilyAsian', 'CharFontFamilyComplex', 'CharFontPitch', 'CharFontPitchAsian' etc. Character properties are described at https://wiki.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/DevGuide/Text/Formatting.

To insert the delimiter into the text: oVC.getText().insertString(oVC, "|", 0).

This python code from github shows how to do most of these things, although you'll need to read through it to find the relevant parts.

Alternatively, instead of using the LibreOffice API, unzip the .odt file and parse content.xml with a script.