Help with regular expressions for adding books

[Vortex]

I have a large group of old books without metadata that have good file names, I want to import them without messing up the Author and Title so I can use it to get the rest of the info from the 'Download Metadata & Cover's'. Every expression I try seems to mess up some of them. The books are all in the format:

Author - Series - Title.ext OR Author - Title.ext

I've been trying to write a simple regex to catch all the characters before the first " - " as the Authors name, no matter what it contains. and everything after the last " - " as the Title, no matter what it contains, and everything in between as the series info, if present.

This works as long as there's a Series but fails if not, and I cant seem to make the series optional:

^(?P<author>.+) - (?P<series>.*) - (?P<title>.+)

Can anyone help please, thanks.

[BetterRed]

I would separate the files into two folders - 'with series' and 'without series'. Stefan's Tools includes an easy to use GUI Grep for Windows

Then add from the two folders with different re's in Preferences->Add Books

BR

[mzmm]

i haven't tested this, but seems like it would work:

^(?P<author>.+) - ((?P<series>.+) - )?(?P<title>.+)

[Vortex]

Thanks for the suggestions.

mzmm, unfortunately it doesn't work, it adds any Series info to the Author. The problem is anything that allows a hyphenated name wont stop at the first " - " deliminator. I'll try one of the coding forums and see if I can get something there.

BR, I know I can do it that way but it's a long way round and shouldn't be necessary.

[kacir]

This works:

^(?P<author>((?!\s-\s).)+)\s-\s(?:(?:\[\s*)?(?P<series>.+)\s(?P<series_index>[\d\.]+)(?:\s*\])?\s-\s)?(?P<title>[^(]+)(?:\(.*\))?

Slightly different implementation

^(?P<author>((?!\s-\s).)+)\s-\s(?:(?:[[(]\s*)?(?P<series>.+)\s(?P<series_index>[\d\.]+)(?:\s*[])])?\s-\s)?(?P<title>[^(]+)(?:\(.*\))?

I had to put those to "code" tags, because the forum server converted some substrings to smileys ;-)

Install plugin called "Quick preferences" - it contains the first of those REs, I think.
The second one was created by me, I think ;-). Search for my posts and phrase "Regular expression".
The RE covers lots of scenarios, including missing series info, series or series number in brackets - square and regular, varying number/kind of whitespace.

Calibre is programmed in Python, and uses Python version of Regular expressions.

[Vortex]

Actually neither of those can cope with the file name "Author - Series - Title.txt"

Your suggestions were really helpful though as I was able to pull the code apart and figure out how to adapt it. This works perfect for my needs:

^(?P<author>((?!\s-\s).)+)\s-\s((?P<series>.+)?\s-\s)?(?P<title>.+)?