OpenOffice.org BASIC Guide - OpenOffice.org wiki

described in Search and Replace.
The Structure of Text Documents
Note – VBA : The content of the procedure described here for accessing the paragraphs of a text is
comparable with the Paragraphs listing used in VBA, which is provided in the Range and Document objects
available there. Whereas in VBA the paragraphs are accessed by their number (for example, by the
Paragraph(1) call), in OpenOffice.org Basic, the Enumeration object described previously should be used.
There is no direct counterpart in OpenOffice.org Basic for the Characters, Sentences and Words lists
provided in VBA. You do, however, have the option of switching to a TextCursor which allows for navigation
at the level of characters, sentences and words.
Paragraph Portions
The previous example may change the text as requested, but it may sometimes also destroy the formatting.
This is because a paragraph in turn consists of individual sub-objects. Each of these sub-objects contains its own
formatting information. If the center of a paragraph, for example, contains a word printed in bold, then it will be
represented in OpenOffice.org by three paragraph portions: the portion before the bold type, then the word in
bold, and finally the portion after the bold type, which is again depicted as normal.
If the text of the paragraph is now changed using the paragraph's String property, then OpenOffice.org first
deletes the old paragraph portions and inserts a new paragraph portion. The formatting of the previous sections is
then lost.
To prevent this effect, the user can access the associated paragraph portions rather than the entire paragraph.
Paragraphs provide their own Enumeration object for this purpose. The following example shows a double loop
which passes over all paragraphs of a text document and the paragraph portions they contain and applies the
replacement processes from the previous example:
Dim Doc As Object
Dim Enum1 As Object
Dim Enum2 As Object
Dim TextElement As Object
Dim TextPortion As Object
Doc = ThisComponent
Enum1 = Doc.Text.createEnumeration
' loop over all paragraphs
While Enum1.hasMoreElements
TextElement = Enum1.nextElement
If TextElement.supportsService("com.sun.star.text.Paragraph") Then
Enum2 = TextElement.createEnumeration
' loop over all sub-paragraphs
While Enum2.hasMoreElements
TextPortion = Enum2.nextElement
MsgBox "'" & TextPortion.String & "'"
TextPortion.String = Replace(TextPortion.String, "you", "U")
TextPortion.String = Replace(TextPortion.String, "too", "2")
TextPortion.String = Replace(TextPortion.String, "for", "4")
Wend
End If
Wend
The example runs through a text document in a double loop. The outer loop refers to the paragraphs of the text.
The inner loop processes the paragraph portions in these paragraphs. The example code modifies the content in
each of these paragraph portions using the String property of the string. as is the case in the previous example
for paragraphs. Since however, the paragraph portions are edited directly, their formatting information is retained
when replacing the string.
Chapter 6 · Text Documents 71