I’m trying to find a way to change double paragraph breaks into a single line break followed by a tab character in my Google Docs document. When I use the find and replace feature and type the actual characters like backslash-n-backslash-t in the replacement field, it just puts those literal characters instead of converting them to the actual formatting codes I want. I’m working with a regular text document, not a Google Sheets file. Does anyone know if this is just something Google Docs can’t do, or is there some trick or workaround that actually works for inserting these special characters?
honestly google docs is pretty limited with this stuff compared to word. i usually just export to .docx, do the find/replace in microsoft word using proper regex, then import back. bit of a hassle but works every time and you can use actual \n\t codes there.
Google Docs handles paragraph formatting differently than plain text editors, so the standard escape sequences won’t work directly in find and replace. What you can do is use the paragraph symbol (¶) in your search - just press Ctrl+Shift+8 to show formatting marks, then you can copy the actual paragraph break symbol and paste it twice in your find field. For the replacement, you’ll need to insert a manual line break (Shift+Enter) followed by copying and pasting a tab character from elsewhere in your document. I’ve used this method when reformatting imported text and it works reliably, though it’s a bit more manual than using escape codes would be.
The workaround I’ve found most effective is actually doing this in two separate steps rather than trying to accomplish it all at once. First, replace all your double paragraph breaks with some unique placeholder text that doesn’t appear anywhere else in your document - something like “XXREPLACE” works well. Then do a second find and replace operation where you search for that placeholder and replace it with your desired formatting. To get the line break plus tab combination, you’ll need to manually create it first somewhere in your document by pressing Shift+Enter then Tab, then copy that combination and paste it into the replace field. This two-step approach has saved me considerable time when cleaning up documents that were imported from other formats where the paragraph structure got messed up.