[enuddleyarbl]

Thanks. I'd been wondering if there were a way to check the end of line. Knowing that $ should come in handy. And I should have thought of the \2 \1 replacement.

Regarding the "full" search:

^(.+),\s(the|a|an)$

I'd wondered about matching "a" before "an". Is the regex parsed left-to-right within the parentheses? If it is, it might catch a trailing

", an"

as

", a"

and leave an "n" hanging off the end of the title. Perhaps just changing the order to:

^(.+),\s(the|an|a)$

would do it.

EDIT: Oops. Nope. That's what the "anchor to the end" "$" is for. With that, "a" won't match "an" since it's not the last string. Sorry.