How to copy table contents from LibreOffice writer to plain text?

Question

If I select a table's contents and try to paste it into a plain text document, the layout gets severely broken.

+-----+----+
|one  |two |
+-----+----+
|three|four|
+-----+----+

becomes, regardless if I use Ctrl C/V or select/MMB,

one
two
three
four

Is it possible to get something like

one<tab>two
three<tab>four

or any other separator between cells except <linebreak>? The workaround with Calc can't be the only way...

Answer 1

You can use a tool such as Pandoc to convert LibreOffice ODT (and many other formats) to a plain text markup (e.g. Markdown, reStructuredText, AsciiDoc, MediaWiki, DokuWiki, Textile`).

A quick online test at Try Pandoc produced this:

Markdown

Test
====

  --------- -----
  Apples    100
  Oranges   77
  --------- -----

------------------------------------------------------------------------

PHP Markdown Extra

Test
====

|---------|-----|
| Apples  | 100 |
| Oranges | 77  |

------------------------------------------------------------------------

ReStructuredText

Test
====

+-----------+-------+
| Apples    | 100   |
+-----------+-------+
| Oranges   | 77    |
+-----------+-------+

--------------

and so on

Answer 2

This is an easy task:

Menu Table -> Convert -> Table to text.... Now, you can select the separating character: