Oops - Accidently copied author to Series - Help Question

[collin8579]

So,, I was bulk editing and doing fine moving series over from Authors

Author - Series - Series index
Moving Series and index to their fields respectivly

Copied over fine,, in my last step I removed the chaff from Author and then tagged the automatically set author sort,,
I was in my search/replace and clicked on my main one (for this process) to look at something,, then went over and auto set author sort, hit apply,,
I didn't realize, to my own sadness,, it would run the search and replace that was in the other tab,,

So, I overwrote the series with the author on 1500 books,, great
Now, I am under the impression there is no way to undo what I just did,, so the first step to me fixing it is removing the authors from the series so I can just put series in later,,

Sooo after all of that,, is there a way to search through for values that are the same in author and series?
I've edited a LOT of books today so I can't just sort by edit date and remove series,,

Appreciate the help,, and that's one mistake I won't make again - Sigh

[Dopedangel]

Originally Posted by collin8579

So,, I was bulk editing and doing fine moving series over from Authors

Author - Series - Series index
Moving Series and index to their fields respectivly

Copied over fine,, in my last step I removed the chaff from Author and then tagged the automatically set author sort,,
I was in my search/replace and clicked on my main one (for this process) to look at something,, then went over and auto set author sort, hit apply,,
I didn't realize, to my own sadness,, it would run the search and replace that was in the other tab,,

So, I overwrote the series with the author on 1500 books,, great
Now, I am under the impression there is no way to undo what I just did,, so the first step to me fixing it is removing the authors from the series so I can just put series in later,,

Sooo after all of that,, is there a way to search through for values that are the same in author and series?
I've edited a LOT of books today so I can't just sort by edit date and remove series,,

Appreciate the help,, and that's one mistake I won't make again - Sigh

You can use populate metadata from file to get author names if you have files that have the metadata. As long as you have formats that have metadata inside and you have used calibre to generate them. Even if you have not used calibre most ebook format should have the metadata.

[Manichean]

I think your best bet at this stage, if you have no backup of your metadata.db file, would be to do a metadata lookup of the damaged books. That could give you some information back.

[collin8579]

That sounds like a good idea, its discriminating those files within the 50k sorting database that is giving me fits,, (yes I took on too much at once),

I thought I might be able to search in the series field,, something like "IF series = authors" but I can't figure out how

[collin8579]

Ok I did some playing, and when I went in to individual edit I was able to revert them to original broken metadata,, which is better than I was expecting,, however 2 things

One: I Still can't find out how to bulk revert them to original?
Two: Still can't find them all in one place without some sort of Author=series search

[Manichean]

Do a search like

authors:"series name"

[collin8579]

I understand that syntax,
however I quite literally meant "author" = "series"
meaning I need them both to be the same to fulfill the criteria,, but not specifically know the name of either up front
So when it does this search it finds
Author Jk Rowling Series JK Rowling
but not Author Jk Rowling Series Harry Potter

Hopefully that clears that question up a little
thanks

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by collin8579

I need them both to be the same to fulfill the criteria,, but not specifically know the name of either up front

You can't do it. Not that way. It's the same question as finding duplicates (A long thread in the development area) or more recently finding language matches:

You have the same choices as in this thread:

https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=125614

Although you can't do it in the search bar, you can create a composite column that compares other columns and produces 'yes' or 'no' as appropriate. Consider chaley's posts about the 'strcmp' function. You can do SQL searches as another option. Searches on duplicate finding will turn up SQL related code.

[collin8579]

Thanks, I"ll check that out

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by collin8579

I understand that syntax,
however I quite literally meant "author" = "series"
meaning I need them both to be the same to fulfill the criteria,, but not specifically know the name of either up front

I know what you meant. But I assume you know which series got borked, so if you search for the series in the author field, you get the messed-up books by series. This obviously doesn't find all of them at once, but I figured this would be better than having to manually search them.

[reading]

If doing this in windows ...

calibredb.exe list --separator , -w 255 -f title,series >tmp.txt
FOR /F "usebackq tokens=1-3 delims=," %a in ("tmp.txt") do if "%b"=="%c" echo %a

The first command should create a comma seperated file with all of your books in it, the format will be "ID,title,series", if you want different fields add them to the -f switch

the second commands reads each line from the text file, seperates each of the comma seperated values into variable %a through %c, in this example we check to see if title (%b) and series (%c) are the same and if so echo the calibre ID which can be used in other calibredb commands.

Note if you add more fields, you need to increase the number of tokens in the second command

like so ..

calibredb.exe list --separator , -w 255 -f authors,title,series >tmp.txt
FOR /F "usebackq tokens=1-4 delims=," %a in ("tmp.txt") do if "%c"=="%d" echo %a,%b,%c

In this case we add authors, and display the ID, title and author on the books that have the problem.

in theory, you can figure out the calibre directory for each file from this

say your calibre database is in C:\Calibre then

calibredb.exe list --separator , -w 255 -f authors,title,series >tmp.txt
FOR /F "usebackq tokens=1-4 delims=," %a in ("tmp.txt") do if "%c"=="%d" echo "C:\Calibre\%b\%c (%a)\metadata.opf"

Should give you a list of all the metadata files you need to go edit ....

[reading]

The following vbs file

'=========================
strFileName = Wscript.Arguments(0)
strItem = Wscript.Arguments(1)
StrSeries="<meta content=""" & strItem & """ name=""calibre:series""/>"

Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objFile = objFSO.OpenTextFile(strFileName, 1)
strText = objFile.ReadAll
objFile.Close

Replace(strText,StrSeries,"")
Set objFile = objFSO.CreateTextFile(strFilename, True)
objFile.Write strText
objFile.Close
'=========================

Should delete the series tag from the OPF file
save the text between the '============ in a file say editopf.vbs

then

cscript editopf.vbs <opffile> "<title>"

would remove the line <meta content="title" name="calibre:series"/> from the opf file

then
calibredb set_metadata ID <opffile>

would update the database

rolling it up

creeat the vbs file above
create a file fix.cmd

REM === FIX.CMD ===
set opf="C:\Calibre\%~2\%~3 (%~1)\metadata.opf"
cscript /nologo editopf.vbs %opf% "%~3"
start "DB" /WAIT cmd /c "C:\program files\calibre2\calibredb.exe" set_metadata %~1 %opf%
REM === END OF FIX.CMD ====

use FIX.CMD ID "Author" "Title"
to fix a single book

then get the list of all your books into tmp.txt with

calibredb.exe list --separator , -w 255 -f authors,title,series >tmp.txt

Now run fix.cmd for each match

FOR /F "usebackq tokens=1-4 delims=," %a in ("tmp.txt") do if "%c"=="%d" call fix.cmd %~a "%~b" "%~c"


Obviously you would want to test it a bit first .... maybe with one book in tmp.txt

[reading]

BTW, for some bizare reason running calibre at the command prompt prevents CMD files from running, so you may need to open a new cmd prompt before you start using the fix.cmd file.

The following line in fix.cmd starts calibredb in a separate cmd process so it doesn't mess up the running of fix.cmd itself.

start "DB" /WAIT cmd /c "C:\program files\calibre2\calibredb.exe" set_metadata %~1 %opf%

if you think that the calibredb command is not working right, you will need to change the /c to /k, this will leave the new cmd window open when calibredb is done so you can see any error message it displayed

[collin8579]

Wow, Thank you - I will have to experiment with this,,