special character managemenet in device filenames

[vyvlad]

calibre has a tendency to replace special characters with _ for filesystem comaptibility reasons. I have a lot of books with multiple special characters (colons, apostrophes, and other punctuation) in both the title and series names, and I tend to use the underlying filesystem to navigate my library on managed devices.

Is there an easy way to change the mapping of many special characters? Regex works well, but single-function mode means that you can only do one character swap per field (unless there's a chaining syntax I couldn't find), and I don't necessarily want to enter a full programming environment just to swap some characters.

[ownedbycats]

I would not advise using illegal characters but if you want to switch all the underscores to something else safe like a period, see this thread.

I am not sure how you'd go about doing multiple replacements though, at least without a composite column.

[vyvlad]

Originally Posted by ownedbycats

I would not advise using illegal characters but if you want to switch all the underscores to something else safe like a period, see this thread.

Sorry I wasn't clear - I am not planning on using illegal characters in the filenames, but I want different behaviors for converting different illegal characters into valid filenames. For example, I want most punctuation to be converted to an empty string, but colons converted to a dash.

[ownedbycats]

Yes, I misunderstood your post at first. Sorry.

[davidfor]

Originally Posted by vyvlad

Is there an easy way to change the mapping of many special characters? Regex works well, but single-function mode means that you can only do one character swap per field (unless there's a chaining syntax I couldn't find), and I don't necessarily want to enter a full programming environment just to swap some characters.

For something like that, using General Program mode makes sense. But, Template program mode would work. For example, changing random characters:

{title:'re(re($,"[os]","f"),"[bdcH]","a")'}

works to change "Bleak House" to "aleak afufe". But I would much rather use:

program:
title = re($title,"[os]","f");
title = re(title,"[bdcH]","a");
strcat(current_library_name(), '/', $author_sort, '/', title, ' - ', $author)

Which is an update to my current send-to-device save template.

[vyvlad]

Originally Posted by davidfor

For something like that, using General Program mode makes sense. But, Template program mode would work. For example, changing random characters:

{title:'re(re($,"[os]","f"),"[bdcH]","a")'}

Cool, I didn't realize Template mode this much flexibility. Thank you!