Escaping Name delimiters

[revjoe]

So I have a whole library dedicated to magazines. For these magazines, I am storing the name of the magazine in the author's column. However, this creates oddness when I have a title like "Muscle & Fitness". Calibre splits that name into two authors "Muscle" and "Fitness". This works fine in 99.9% of my regular books, but doesn't work well for my magazines.

Is there anyway to escape this behavior? something to tell calibre to treat this as a whole string, rather than splitting it?

Thanks

Joe

[FizzyWater]

I think what you want is under Preferences > Tweaks > Author sort name algorithm and > Splitting Multiple author names.

[BetterRed]

There's this tweak

ID: authors_split_regex

By default, calibre splits a string containing multiple author names on
ampersands and the words "and" and "with". You can customize the splitting
by changing the regular expression below. Strings are split on whatever the
specified regular expression matches, in addition to ampersands.
Default: r'(?i),?\s+(and|with)\s+'

I don't know if it can be made to ignore the '&' - maybe a regex guru will tell us

I replace the '&' with a '+' - so Muscle + Fitness, House + Garden etc

For magazines/journal etc I also put titles in author, and I put the nominal date eg 2014-02, issue number etc in title. Good to know someone else does something similar

BR

[theducks]

You do run the risk of messing up the rest of your library just for this one Author

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by theducks

You do run the risk of messing up the rest of your library just for this one Author

I have a dedicated physical library for my Journals and Magazines, I assumed the OP was doing the same.

I put the article authors in a separate custom column - messy but liveable with... just.


Added

I often think about putting my three main libraries into dedicated calibre portable installs.

I have to change the 'Author sort name algorithm' when I switch, which means a restart, in one library I have VL Tabs which are a waste of space in the other two etc etc. So I might as well exit and start a different portable.

Anyone know why that wouldn't work ?

The only downside I can see is three undifferentiated calibre icons in my task/launch bar (dock) - I'm sure I can fix that.

BR

[revjoe]

Yeah, I have a separate library for periodicals as well. As for it being one author, what I gave was just an example. For some stats:

Total record: 3096
Total Authors: 312
Affected Authors * : 31
Affected Books *: 441

Affected books have either "and" or "&" in the Author field, thus being split into separate authors. Compounding matters, many share words, so I have an author "Muscle" that can reflect back to several different periodicals.

So I have about 10% of my authors being affected, and about 14% of my total records. Hence the question.

I was hoping I could do something like prepend a " ' " the way excel does in order to make the column as text, or add a " \ " to the " & " character to have it avoid being split upon. I will have to go back and examine whether changing the split fields will end up doing more hard than good.



Thanks for the input everyone.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by revjoe

Yeah, I have a separate library for periodicals as well. As for it being one author, what I gave was just an example. For some stats:

Total record: 3096
Total Authors: 312
Affected Authors * : 31
Affected Books *: 441

Affected books have either "and" or "&" in the Author field, thus being split into separate authors. Compounding matters, many share words, so I have an author "Muscle" that can reflect back to several different periodicals.

So I have about 10% of my authors being affected, and about 14% of my total records. Hence the question.

I was hoping I could do something like prepend a " ' " the way excel does in order to make the column as text, or add a " \ " to the " & " character to have it avoid being split upon. I will have to go back and examine whether changing the split fields will end up doing more hard than good.



Thanks for the input everyone.

If you 'null' the regular expression in authors_split_regex (see attachment) then that will stop it splitting on 'and' and 'with'. Then you could at least change "Muscle & Fitness" to "Muscle and Fitness" etc

But, as theducks has the reminded us, doing this sort of thing can screw up your other libraries. I think all the Tweaks are global, so you have to remember to adjust them when you switch libraries.

Maybe I should bite the bullet and put my 3 major libraries into separate calibre portable installation folders - weekend job I think

BR

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

But, as theducks has the reminded us, doing this sort of thing can screw up your other libraries. I think all the Tweaks are global, so you have to remember to adjust them when you switch libraries.

Indeed, tweaks are global -- located in %calibreconfig%\tweaks.py

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Indeed, tweaks are global -- located in %calibreconfig%\tweaks.py

Indeed, but which %calibreconfig% would that be I now have more than one !!

I just copied the the three small test libraries I have for each of my major libraries (JournalsTest, MainTest, MediaTest) into there own instances of calibre portable along with a copy of the 'global' calibre config folder.

Seems OK, I can now apply that author name split tweak to my journals library and leave the others at the default etc etc,

I solved the undifferentiated calibre icons in my task bar 'problem' with pStart

BR

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Indeed, but which %calibreconfig% would that be I now have more than one !!

I just copied the the three small test libraries I have for each of my major libraries (JournalsTest, MainTest, MediaTest) into there own instances of calibre portable along with a copy of the 'global' calibre config folder.

Seems OK, I can now apply that author name split tweak to my journals library and leave the others at the default etc etc,

I solved the undifferentiated calibre icons in my task bar 'problem' with pStart

BR

You could also use the environment variable CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY in bat scripts.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

You could also use the environment variable CALIBRE_CONFIG_DIRECTORY in bat scripts.

There are reasons why that won't work for me today, tried and thought about it for about 12 months.

Maybe once I've established a configuration that works with library specific portables, and rejigged and poked some non calibre things, I'll be in a position to switch to a script based solution and dispense with the portables.

Calibre is just the left front paw

BR