[lumilemon]

I am using Fanficfare to sort through my AO3 metadata and the relationships/ships section has an issue with how AO3 formats the platonic relationships vs the romantic ones.
Romantic relationships are character/character and platonic ones are character & character. It's the spaces that are causing the issue here.
I noticed this issue trying to keep the original order of the tags in my metadata, which is done with contains names check which changes ',' into '&'. This highlighted the issue that all platonic relationships were showing up wrong.

This is what my ships column looked like at first:
Character A/Character B, Character C, Character A, Character D/Character E

Then after the 'contains names' was checked:
Character A/Character B & Character C & Character A & Character D/Character E

Also this looks very confusing.

I have brute forced the issue a bit but it is not elegant at all. Only downloaded calibre a few days ago, even though I already had an archive of fan works on an SD card. Either way I am very very new to all this.

I looked through the default.ini on fanficfare to see if I could change how they sort relationships but no luck. Eventually through a lot of searching I found someone mentioning a replace metadata code where they were trying to replace & with and for aesthetics, and I realised that might work really well for me.
I put this code under [epub] and under [archiveofourown.org] just in case.
ships,=>&=>and

This works but it is very inellegant and I would prefer a template or code that let me have my metadata in the original order while keeping the commas. Is there any way to do this??