MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Search and replace returns entire field when no match is found

wladdy · 02-14-2014, 10:07 AM

A bunch of books titles contain either the title followd by the publication year (eg: "The shining (1977)") or the title by itself (eg: "Carrie").

To isolate all years and move them into pubdate, I search for the following regex in the title field (let's assume no parenthesis in the book titles per se) :

.* \((\d{4})\)

Although \1 returns "1977" for the first example, it also returns "Carrie" for the second, despite there being no match.

Granted, I can work around this by this first selecting the books whose title contains parentheses. However, I would like to understand better how Calibre's search and replace feature works with regexes.

Therefore, my question is: can I tell Calibre to return nothing instead of everything when no match is found.

Thank you!

02-14-2014, 10:07 AM	#1
wladdy Enthusiast Posts: 28 Karma: 10 Join Date: Oct 2010 Device: iPad / Kindle DX	Search and replace returns entire field when no match is found A bunch of books titles contain either the title followd by the publication year (eg: "The shining (1977)") or the title by itself (eg: "Carrie"). To isolate all years and move them into pubdate, I search for the following regex in the title field (let's assume no parenthesis in the book titles per se) : .* \((\d{4})\) Although \1 returns "1977" for the first example, it also returns "Carrie" for the second, despite there being no match. Granted, I can work around this by this first selecting the books whose title contains parentheses. However, I would like to understand better how Calibre's search and replace feature works with regexes. Therefore, my question is: can I tell Calibre to return nothing instead of everything when no match is found. Thank you!