How to replace a text with a respect to spaces and new lines using odfdo

Question

I have the following code in my Python script:

body.replace("MAIN_TEXT", """some multiline \n\n text """)

When I try to replace "MAIN_TEXT" with the multiline string, the result I get is: some multiline text

How do I preserve the line breaks? This is my code:

`
from pathlib import Path    
from odfdo import Document

_DOC_SEQUENCE = 700
DATA = Path(__file__).parent / "data"
SOURCE = "lorem.odt"
OUTPUT_DIR = Path(__file__).parent / "recipes_output" / "replaced_text"
TARGET = "lorem_replaced.odt"


def save_new(document: Document, name: str):
    OUTPUT_DIR.mkdir(parents=True, exist_ok=True)
    new_path = OUTPUT_DIR / name
    print("Saving:", new_path)
    document.save(new_path, pretty=True)


def search_replace(document):
    body = document.body

    body.replace("MAIN_TEXT", """some multiline \n\n         text

""")

def main():
    document = Document(DATA / SOURCE)
    search_replace(document)
    save_new(document, TARGET)


if __name__ == "__main__":
    main()`

Answer 1

The odfdo version 3.13.5 added the option formatted to script odfdo-replace and to the method .replace() to interpret the space, tab and CR characters of the replacement string. This seems to meet your need.

So in your code, use:

body.replace("MAIN_TEXT", """some multiline \n\n         text
""", formatted=True)