Global Search and Replace Question

[Joan M]

I used Edit Metadata in Bulk to search the Authors field for the character ; and replace it with the character &. Yes, I have a backup. Yes, I tried a test first and the replace seemed to work properly.

After this operation on around 700 titles, I used Advanced Search/Author to search for all instances of "&". The search finds zero results. Searching on other fields for the character "&" does return results. I am not missing any records that I can tell.

Any thoughts on why this is?

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Joan M

I used Edit Metadata in Bulk to search the Authors field for the character ; and replace it with the character &. Yes, I have a backup. Yes, I tried a test first and the replace seemed to work properly.

After this operation on around 700 titles, I used Advanced Search/Author to search for all instances of "&". The search finds zero results. Searching on other fields for the character "&" does return results. I am not missing any records that I can tell.

Any thoughts on why this is?

Symbols can be special characters.
In REGEX Mode, always escape special characters(like): \& \. \+ \?
so they are treated as characters, not controls

[Joan M]

REGEX Mode?

[kovidgoyal]

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/regexp.html

[Joan M]

I guess the joke's on me.

[Joan M]

No disrespect intended, truly, but I followed the instructions provided in that Edit Metadata in Bulk and something weird resulted. Assuming I don't want to master some aspect of Python (other than the ones in my avatar) right now, could someone tell me what I could do to have things revert back to normal?

Uninstall calibre?
Install my backup?

Some of us are not geeks. Thanks for any help.

ETA: In fairness, I see that theducks did answer my original question.

[Adoby]

In the search and replace dialogue you can specify what mode you want to use. There you can turn off RegExp mode, if you wish.

[Joan M]

Originally Posted by Adoby

In the search and replace dialogue you can specify what mode you want to use. There you can turn off RegExp mode, if you wish.

In the operation(s) I did, I used the default, "character match." The other choice was "regular expression." Is that what you mean? Thanks.

[Adoby]

Since the ampersand is used to separate authors, you can't search authors for & directly.

But in the field author_sort the authors are combined, with the & as separator. So if you search in author_sort you can list all books with multiple authors.

Put this in the search bar: author_sort:"&"

[kovidgoyal]

authors:#>1

[Adoby]

Thanks. I looked for that before, without any luck. Live and learn.

http://manual.calibre-ebook.com/gui.html#search-sort

You can search for the number of items in multiple-valued fields such as tags. These searches begin with the character #, then use the same syntax as numeric fields. For example, to find all books with more than 4 tags use tags:#>4. To find all books with exactly 10 tags use tags:#=10.

[Joan M]

Originally Posted by Adoby

Since the ampersand is used to separate authors, you can't search authors for & directly.

No, really, I could indeed search directly in all fields (before I did that global search and replace) by just clicking on the binoculars icon on the left of the search bar. If I entered "&" or ";" in, say, the title or author field, it pulled up all such instances in those fields. This was important to me as I had hundreds of multiple authors in the authors field separated by ";" some with spaces before and after, others not; hundreds of titles in the authors fields, some with characters like ";" and on and on. But the global search and replace screwed that up for me. With no warning.

Put this in the search bar: author_sort:"&"

Ooooh! That works! This was very useful information. Thank you.

Now, my simple-minded question earlier was serious. How would I get calibre to revert to how it was before? Uninstall calibre? Install my backup? Throw salt over my left shoulder? Thanks again.

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Joan M

Now, my simple-minded question earlier was serious. How would I get calibre to revert to how it was before? Uninstall calibre? Install my backup? Throw salt over my left shoulder? Thanks again.

Exit calibre and restore your backup library. If nothing else has changed you can simply replace the metadata.db with your backup metadata.db file.

[Joan M]

Now don't laugh at me, but if I exit calibre, how do I restore my backup library?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Joan M

Now don't laugh at me, but if I exit calibre, how do I restore my backup library?

How did you create your backup library?