Automatically add in data into columns when adding books

[yamusing]

How do I make it so calibre adds in data in certain columns using the title of the imported books? For example I have a 2 books with these titles
Title book 1: "[leaf409] No Invader (Blue Sky 2011-12) (grb90) [Spanish]"
Title book 2: "[Heari pan] Luminous paladin (King)"

I want it so the "[leaf409]" and "[Heari pan] automatically gets put into the "artist" custom column and the "(Blue Sky 2011-12)" and "(King)" into a custom column called "Thology".

Also after I do this I would like an option to make all the highlighted books to have everything in brackets and square brackets to be removed such as book 1 is named "No Invader" and book 2 as "Luminous paladin"

Help would be appriciated, I have lots of book with this title format and have to manually go through them which takes a lot of time.

[Adoby]

You are in luck! Calibre is the perfect tool for what you need.

1. Import with the full filename as the title.

2. Then use a couple of search and replace with regular expressions to populate other fields from the title. Authors, series and custom fields so on.

3. Do a final search and replace to remove everything from the title, except the title.

This is the normal process I use when adding books with descriptive AND uniform filenames to calibre.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Adoby

You are in luck! Calibre is the perfect tool for what you need.

1. Import with the full filename as the title.

2. Then use a couple of search and replace with regular expressions to populate other fields from the title. Authors, series and custom fields so on.

3. Do a final search and replace to remove everything from the title, except the title.

This is the normal process I use when adding books with descriptive AND uniform filenames to calibre.

This assume there is a reason the metadata is Not already embedded (that way is better and faster)

[yamusing]

Originally Posted by Adoby

You are in luck! Calibre is the perfect tool for what you need.

1. Import with the full filename as the title.

2. Then use a couple of search and replace with regular expressions to populate other fields from the title. Authors, series and custom fields so on.

3. Do a final search and replace to remove everything from the title, except the title.

This is the normal process I use when adding books with descriptive AND uniform filenames to calibre.

I'm doing something similar to this, but with adding books using this regular expression "(?P<author>\[.*?\]) (?P<title>.+) (?P<publisher>(.*?)\(.*?\))".

using the bulk search and replace option to move everything from the "author" column to the "artist" column, and then the "publisher" to the "Thology" column.

When its done I removed the square and round brackets in both columns using character match, then remove all the metadata from the "author" and "publisher" column.


I wouldn't have to go through all this if the regular expession accepted custom columns, the "(?P<author>\[.*?\]) (?P<title>.+) (?P<publisher>(.*?)\(.*?\))" works to automatically add in metadata but the "(?P<artist>\[.*?\]) (?P<title>.+) (?P<thology>(.*?)\(.*?\))" returns an error.

[Adoby]

Try #artist and #thology instead? No idea if it works, might be worth testing...

# is used as prefix for custom field names.

[yamusing]

Originally Posted by Adoby

Try #artist and #thology instead? No idea if it works, might be worth testing...

# is used as prefix for custom field names.

I tried using "#artist" and "#thology" but it returns an error and I can't use it. I tried just using "artist" and "thology" but it does nothing to add metadata in that field.

[kovidgoyal]

You cannot use custom fields in regular expressions.