Hi. I have this same need -- after a major loss of hardware, recreating my calibre library I find myself doing a lot of the same cleanup I did manually the first time as I added all my books. Re-entering series information,r e-deleting series information from titles, and lots of metadata downloads amounting to real inefficiency of time spent.
I have no experience with regular expressions, regex, reged, and everything else mentioned in this conversation. The /s(.+) and etc really had thrown me for a loop.
Is there a place where complete noobs can figure this stuff out?
For example, in the series of Otherworld books, which has ~30 titles, some in prequel mode and some chronological additions in the midst of the original series order. The series, index, title, and author are all appearing concatenated in the title field for some reason (though the files are not named that way).
Search and replace, I can figure out how to remove the english language words but not how to remove the index items. boolean search options don't seem to work. If there is a bulk way to fix this kind of stuff (after having spent the time doing "manage series" and manual title edits on a cadre of books, dealing with title field issues is really becoming a drain.
Is there some place a body could learn how to do this stuff, given that I'm no sort of programmer and don't know what plugboards are, and half of what's written here makes no sense to me at all?
Thanks for your time,
M-
Edit: I have now read the similar post:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118569
And although I now have a bit more of a sense of regular expressions, I do still need help figuring out how to implement that information. eg, in a series of records that include "otherworld" space - space "index" where the value can be either a two digit index or a decimaled 3 digit index space - space "title", how would I bulk remove everything but the actual Title, since all other information is already populated in the appropriate fields for those records?