Regex assistance request - importing books.

[Belfaborac]

Dear all,

I'm having some trouble with complex book titles, such as this fictional example:

Some Author - Ancient Egypt BC 3000-732 - The Sixth Dynasty BC 2345-2181

In Calibre three first columns are Title, Author, Series and the title above ends up like this:

Ancient Egypt BC | Some Author | -nothing-

when I want it to end up thus:

The Sixth Dynasty BC 2345-2181 | Some Author | Ancient Egypt BC 3000-732


Sadly my brain is biologically incompatible with everything to do with scripts, programming and such, so I haven't a clue what's going on. The regex script I use was copied from an old post here and I quite frankly have no idea how it does what it does. I just use it because it works just fine with most books and better than the other scripts I tried.

The script is:

(?P<author>[a-zA-Z&' \.]+?) - \[?((?P<series>[a-zA-Z' ]+) (?P<series_index>[0-9\.]+)\]? - )?(?P<title>[a-zA-Z,'\.\- ]+).*

It's hardly a big deal, but it would be very cool if it could be made to work and if some kind soul could give me some guidance I'd be very grateful.

[Serpentine]

It would help if you could give a larger sample set to work with, I am sure that this is over simplistic example that you have given

However, assuming that your set will always have the formatting given in your post as :
{author} - {series name} - {book title}
or as an example:
Some Author - Some Series - This Title Hrrr

The regex would be as simple as :
(?P<author>.+?) - (?P<series>.+?) - (?P<title>.+)

The pitfall would be titles that could have a spaced dash in them "Novel A - A Book About Things". There is also no provision for a series index. The following examples include two ways that may be more correct for series indices.

I think your real case is most likely closer to something like this :
Some Author - Some Series [4.0] - This Title Hrrr
regex : (?P<author>.+?) - (?P<series>.+?) (?:\[(?P<series_index>[\d\.]{1,4})\] )?- (?P<title>.+)

Or as the old regex expects :
Some Author - [Some Series 4.0] - This Title Hrrr
regex : (?P<author>.+?) - (?:\[(?P<series>.+?) ?(?P<series_index>[\d\.]{1,4})?\]) - (?P<title>.+)

If none of them match the case, feel free to either PM me a list or reply here with more examples.

[Belfaborac]

See, now I just feel stupid....

Your first example, which is so simple I could *perhaps* have constructed it myself, worked just fine. I guess I simply didn't consider going right back to basics before coming straight here, crying for help.

Thank you so much for saving me from my own ineptitude!