It occurred to me that you cannot be the only user with
author - [series -] title filenames. I've seen too many references that follow that exact format in the forums. So I decided to do a search...
I found this topic,
Regular Expression Help, which specifically addresses your exact needs. It even accounts for the Series Index. The reliance on " - " to separate fields was removed. This means hyphenated names, or titles with dashes, should not be a problem when importing books.
Of course, that doesn't mean you won't still have some issues using it. Other potential problem areas are:
- authors listed as surname, firstname;
- multiple authors per book;
- unicode characters (I believe calibre strips them out);
- symbols and numbers used in filenames ("&" between two authors, "leetspeak", etc)
I'm not sure about all of these, just guessing based on what I can understand of all the gobbledygook in the regex. And I know that something will come along and "break" the expression simply because it was not designed to account for every possible situation in every possible language.
So a review of all automated imported books would still be in order. But it should do the trick on most of them!
Keep in mind, if metadata is defined within the files, it will take precedence over the regex filename info unless you uncheck
Preferences>General>Read metadata from files.