MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Help with RegEx to parse title with colon

racergirl76 · 02-15-2016, 05:38 PM

I've been combing these forums for a week looking for a solution and am now admitting defeat.

I stongly prefer the Title field contain the full (long) title of a book:
"Maintitle of Book: Subtitle aka Strapline"

For more effencient use of the title contents for writing to disc/saving, templates, and for plugboards, I need to parse the title into two userdefined columns
"#maintitle" & "#subtitle"

So, I tried using the custom column feature, BUT the colon ":" is part of the regex language and my non-existant regex skills can't figure out how to tell it to
1. Take everything before the ':' and copy to #maintitle
2. Take everything after the ': ' and copy to #subtitle

Workarounds such as manually separating the subtitle into comments or another column promotes inconsistency and incompleteness that doesn't work for me.

Any help is greatly appreciated, assume I know nothing about Regex. Reading the tutorials and absorbing them are two different things.

02-15-2016, 05:38 PM	#1
racergirl76 Junior Member Posts: 2 Karma: 10 Join Date: Feb 2016 Device: Nexus 7	Help with RegEx to parse title with colon I've been combing these forums for a week looking for a solution and am now admitting defeat. I stongly prefer the Title field contain the full (long) title of a book: "Maintitle of Book: Subtitle aka Strapline" For more effencient use of the title contents for writing to disc/saving, templates, and for plugboards, I need to parse the title into two userdefined columns "#maintitle" & "#subtitle" So, I tried using the custom column feature, BUT the colon ":" is part of the regex language and my non-existant regex skills can't figure out how to tell it to 1. Take everything before the ':' and copy to #maintitle 2. Take everything after the ': ' and copy to #subtitle Workarounds such as manually separating the subtitle into comments or another column promotes inconsistency and incompleteness that doesn't work for me. Any help is greatly appreciated, assume I know nothing about Regex. Reading the tutorials and absorbing them are two different things.