Find and replace literal control characters Is it possible to replace control characters like newline and tab in Pages version 5.6.1?

I'm aware of How to use find and replace to replace a character with new line and the possibility of inserting literal characters in TextEdit by using option-return or option-tab but both those don't apply to current Pages version.

In my case I want to replace multiple newlines with a single one, I tried exporting the document to ODF and doing the replace with LibreOffice but the structure of the document is such that LibreOffice cannot correctly save it back.
Once the file with the replaced newlines is saved I cannot open it again, neither with Pages nor with LibreOffice itself.
Pages no longer supports finding and replacing "special" characters since version 5.1.

Just one of the features that disappeared not to come back again.