inserting new line with OpenOffice::OODoc - perl

Question

I am having quite the issue creating a new line with this module and feel like I am just missing something.
my perl code looks like this:
use OpenOffice::OODoc;
my $name = "foo <br> bar";
$name=~s/<br>/\n/g;
my $outdir = "template.odt";
my $doc = ooDocument(file => $outdir);
my #pars = $doc->getParagraphList();
for my $p (#pars)
{
$doc->substituteText($p,'{TODAY}',$date);
$doc->substituteText($p,'{NAME}',$name);
...
Problem is when I open it in word or open office I have no newlines. Although if it open it in a text edit I have my new lines.. Any ideas of how to fix this?

Answer 1

Ok I figured it out, hopefully this will save someone hours of searching for the same thing. I added:
use Encode qw(encode);
ooLocalEncoding('utf8');
my $linebreak = encode('utf-8', "\x{2028}");
$doc->substituteText($p,'<br>', $linebreak);
So my final code looks like this:
use OpenOffice::OODoc;
use Encode qw(encode);
ooLocalEncoding('utf8');
my $linebreak = encode('utf-8', "\x{2028}");
my $outdir = "template.odt";
my $name = "foo <br> bar";
my $outdir = "template.odt";
my $doc = ooDocument(file => $outdir);
my #pars = $doc->getParagraphList();
for my $p (#pars)
{
$doc->substituteText($p,'{TODAY}',$date);
$doc->substituteText($p,'{NAME}',$name);
$doc->substituteText($p,'<br>', $linebreak);
...
Maybe not the best way to do things but it worked!

Answer 2

You could try and insert and empty para after the current one:
If the 'text' option is empty, calling this method is the equivalent
of adding a line feed.
This sequence (in a text document) inserts a linefeed immediately after paragraph 4. Replace 4 with current position.
$doc->insertElement
(
'//text:p', 4, 'text:p',
position => 'after',
text => '',
);