Searching and replacing in different fields

[lbutlr]

I imported some books that had titles like “Name of Series 01 Title of First book in series”. I tried to use the multi-edit find and replace to set the series name and index number and was able to do so. I ended up doing it by hand, but I am curious if this is possible.

First, I searched title for (\d\d) and tried to set the index number to \1 but got a string conversion error. I am guessing that Calibre did not like the ’01’ and that I would need to somehow get a ‘1’ and also get a ’11’, but I didn’t have time to figure out the regex for that… ([1-9]?\d) maybe?)

Also, it looks like this would have to be done in two steps, at minimum, one to set the series name and on to set the index number, or is there a way to set both fields in one swell loop?

[kjdavies]

Originally Posted by lbutlr

I imported some books that had titles like “Name of Series 01 Title of First book in series”. I tried to use the multi-edit find and replace to set the series name and index number and was able to do so. I ended up doing it by hand, but I am curious if this is possible.

First, I searched title for (\d\d) and tried to set the index number to \1 but got a string conversion error. I am guessing that Calibre did not like the ’01’ and that I would need to somehow get a ‘1’ and also get a ’11’, but I didn’t have time to figure out the regex for that… ([1-9]?\d) maybe?)

Also, it looks like this would have to be done in two steps, at minimum, one to set the series name and on to set the index number, or is there a way to set both fields in one swell loop?

I've done this quite a bit. The RE for this one might be something like

^(.*?) (\d+)\s*

Assigning to series as

\1 [\2]

That is,

Name of Series 01 Title of First book in series

results in the series and series index of

Name of Series [1.00]

because of how the series_index is managed after assignment. The title and sort_title are unchanged. You'll have to go back a second time to remove the name of the series and the series_index value from the title... which is why I wrote the RE as I did, so it can be reused (apply find and replace on title, assigning nothing to the title, will replace 'Name of Series 01 ' with nothing, leaving you with 'Title of First book in series' in the title field).

[lbutlr]

Thanks you!