soft carriage return

[HuiDBK]

How do I replace a soft carriage return with a hard carriage return in a docx document

[ME-researchgroup]

In Word you can replace ^l (lowercase L) with ^p to turn line breaks into new paragraphs, which I guess is what you're referring to. As far as I know, this is not supported in this library. Seeing that @scanny no longer seems to maintain any of his great libraries, I don't expect this will ever be implemented either..

I think your best bet would be to loop over your paragraphs' text and create a new paragraph whenever you encounter a \n. This is kind of hacky and it will not be trivial to keep track of any markup in the text.

[scanny]

In the XML, there are <w:cr/> elements (carriage-return) and <w:p> elements (paragraph). A paragraph corresponds to what I believe you mean by "hard" carriage return and <w:cr> corresponds to "soft" carriage return.

In the API document for Run.text you can see that <w:cr> elements are represented as \n characters, so they are discoverable. https://python-docx.readthedocs.io/en/latest/api/text.html#docx.text.run.Run.text

Offhand I'd say the algorithm would be roughly:

1. Iterate over the runs of the paragraph.
2. Skip any that don't contain a \n character.
3. Split each run on \n characters.
4. Add a paragraph for each of splits[1:] when it produces more than one fragment leaving the text before where it is and moving the text after to the next paragraph.

I suspect you'll find that the \n characters are also present in the value of Paragraph.text, so that might be more convenient.

The actual algorithm will take some noodling and research I expect, like how you insert new paragraphs in the right spot and so on.