Lastname, Firstname filenames - Any way to import correct author name?

[Starson17]

All of my books are in this format:
Lastname, Firstname - Seriesname 01 - Title.ext

For those who have had to use folders to sort and locate ebooks, it made sense to have the author's last name first, so lots of others have big collections in the Lastname-first format.

Is there any way to reverse the name order during import? I've seen lots of regex expressions, but none seem to deal with this. From what I can see, the regex Python based importing needs the author's name as a single continuous string.

I'd love to see the tags <author-firstname> and <author-lastname> supported so I could do a regex like:

(?P<author-lastname>.+), (?P<author-firstname>.+) - (?P<title>.+)

and have it generate the tag <author> from the two components.

Is it worth opening a wishlist ticket on this? It seems to be a common problem.

[lattiboy]

This saved my life:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=11

The included code works wonderfully.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by lattiboy

This saved my life:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...4&postcount=11

The included code works wonderfully.

Thanks, but as you can see from your link, that code won't pick up the author in lastname, firstname format, which is why I asked. I don't think it's currently possible.

It's not too hard to write massive batch files to temporarily rename my files, then import them, but it would be much easier if I could simply match the author's first and last name separately and have Calibre put the name halves together internally.

[tapar]

I have been working on whipping my collection into shape for Calibre. I found an awesome application called "Book Sorter" that corrects the firstname/lastname ordering. http://iterati.org/ebookTools/BookSorter/Default.aspx

It has some other cool features other than renaming and sorting books. It can create copies of your books sorted into genre directories based on the author. I have not experimented with that yet personally though. I used it to fix my collections lastname/firstname issues and it did the job admirably.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by tapar

I have been working on whipping my collection into shape for Calibre. I found an awesome application called "Book Sorter" that corrects the firstname/lastname ordering.

That looks very useful, thanks for the link. I did the same sort of thing for my initial import of my library by creating some massive renaming batch files, but running "Book Sorter" would be a lot easier.

I was just trying to avoid preprocessing filenames before importing books, as I see this as an ongoing issue.

[tapar]

Book Sorter was a particularly handy tool for me since the ebooks I was preparing to import had a mix of author name formats. It would have taken forever to separate them out and identify duplicates.

What I did was point it at a directory filled with folders for each author. I even had duplicates of author folders with different name orders. The folders for each author sometimes contained duplicates with different name orders. I had Book Sorter do a move on the books to a new output directory. The books that got left behind were my duplicates, which made them a manageable subset of the whole collection to deal with.

I did have some problems where some books did not have the author in the filename at all, those typically just had the book title. To resolve that I found "BulkRenameUtility" to be a super help to quickly go in and rename the books that needed it with the author: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk They have an option to "append folder name" which was a quick and easy way to add the author to the filename.