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Old 08-08-2013, 07:57 PM   #10
Rob557
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Posts: 108
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Join Date: Jul 2012
Device: Kobo
Adoby's posting has prompted me to belatedly note a different "regular expressions" approach that I've used to extract the series number from the title field, when there is not a standard format for how the series number appears in the title field:

a) apply this to only the problem books and confirm there are no other numeric values in the title field other than the series number,

b) set "title" as the search field and "series_index" (or a temp work field) as the destination field, and use the regular expression [ a-zA-Z ( ) \[ \] \_ \- \& ,;:'"!&] which should hopefully get rid of everything except the numerical series number ... if the bulk edit won't run it means there's another sneaky character in there somewhere and your destination field only accepts numerical characters.

c) set "title" as the search field and a temp work field as the destination field (to be copied into the title field if all goes well) and use the regular expression [0-9] to get rid of the numerical series numbers (include \- if a dash accompanies the series numbers and does not otherwise appear in the various titles) ... a regular boolean search and replace can be used to get rid of extra spaces, although an extra space at the end or beginning of a field can be another complication.

Anyway, just another pragmatic approach.

Also a related reminder note about chaley's tip on how to reset a numeric field to be a blank field (although unrelated to bulk edits and regular expressions):
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=186220
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