Search and replace returns entire field when no match is found

[wladdy]

A bunch of books titles contain either the title followd by the publication year (eg: "The shining (1977)") or the title by itself (eg: "Carrie").

To isolate all years and move them into pubdate, I search for the following regex in the title field (let's assume no parenthesis in the book titles per se) :

.* \((\d{4})\)

Although \1 returns "1977" for the first example, it also returns "Carrie" for the second, despite there being no match.

Granted, I can work around this by this first selecting the books whose title contains parentheses. However, I would like to understand better how Calibre's search and replace feature works with regexes.

Therefore, my question is: can I tell Calibre to return nothing instead of everything when no match is found.

Thank you!

[cybmole]

advanced search - "what kind of match to use"- what do you have that set to?

if I search my entire library - with that field dropdown option set to Regular Expresssion:.... and with your find regex, i.e. with this in the title box
.* \((\d{4})\)
it finds only books with a four digit number in the title
8 hits out of nearly 2000 titles.
strangely, none of my 8 hits have brackets around the numbers, so that regex is not quote right yet, but I don't get what you are describing
For me, that code it is finding titles like
The War Within: A Secret White House History 2006-2008
but as per my knowledge of regex, I should find no matches, either the calibre version is a different dialect or the escape-bracket bits are being ignored ?

I also observe the when any advanced search query is loaded into the search bar, a tilde ~ is added to the search term. that's another bit of regex-foo that I don't get

[cybmole]

can I have a 2nd opinion on my previous post tests please. The OP seems to have lost interest but I am still puzzled re the brackets.