MobileRead Forums - View Single Post - Way to extract delimited part of title and copy it to author/series fields?

anoukaimee · 02-02-2023, 05:23 PM

I have a fairly large periodical library; I'm organizing it by delimiting the title with a comma, with year and month following thereafter (as in "Gardens Illustrated, 2019 11," where Gardens Illustrated is the title, and 2019 11 the publication date).

For these, I've been formatting the author as "Gardens Illustrated, Staff of," and the series as (surprise!) "Gardens Illustrated."

I have many magazines that are "stragglers"--solo or just a pair that currently list author as "Unknown" and have the series field empty; it would be great to avoid typing all of this just to satisfy my hyperfocusing self.

Wondering if there is a plugin, or a regex formula of some sort, that can be employed to bulk edit these, taking the part of title before the delimiter "," and copying it into the author and series field--bonus points if it can add ", Staff of" to the author field, but that's not entirely necessary.

It looks like Job Spy has some potential for doing this but just for self-made fields? Unsure.

I apologize; for as fascinated by regex as I am in the abstract, it invariably proves to be a rabbit hole I dive down to find myself utterly frustrated five hours later. So asking ahead of time this time.

02-02-2023, 05:23 PM	#1
anoukaimee Enthusiast Posts: 30 Karma: 10 Join Date: Aug 2017 Location: USA Device: Kobo Clara, Pixel 6 (Moon Reader/Calibre Companion), Amazon Fire 10	Way to extract delimited part of title and copy it to author/series fields? I have a fairly large periodical library; I'm organizing it by delimiting the title with a comma, with year and month following thereafter (as in "Gardens Illustrated, 2019 11," where Gardens Illustrated is the title, and 2019 11 the publication date). For these, I've been formatting the author as "Gardens Illustrated, Staff of," and the series as (surprise!) "Gardens Illustrated." I have many magazines that are "stragglers"--solo or just a pair that currently list author as "Unknown" and have the series field empty; it would be great to avoid typing all of this just to satisfy my hyperfocusing self. Wondering if there is a plugin, or a regex formula of some sort, that can be employed to bulk edit these, taking the part of title before the delimiter "," and copying it into the author and series field--bonus points if it can add ", Staff of" to the author field, but that's not entirely necessary. It looks like Job Spy has some potential for doing this but just for self-made fields? Unsure. I apologize; for as fascinated by regex as I am in the abstract, it invariably proves to be a rabbit hole I dive down to find myself utterly frustrated five hours later. So asking ahead of time this time.