Import woes into .95 beta

[GlennMaples]

First, great jobs on improving this app. It was not usable for my purposes (very large library) alst time I tried; now it looks much more scalable. Fantastic job!!!

1) in 6.95 the "Test" button to test regex expressions for save/edit preferences does not seem to work.

2) I am having problems with getting an assortment of file names to parse correctly. In one case there was a file name with a "curly" apostrophe. I'm guessing that this is not allowed--but even when I copied it into notepad and recopied it into back into the windows file name editor with ' the file still did not parse correctly -- shows weird character instead of apostrophe and the rest of the parse did not complete.

3) even more troubling I have a series of files from the same source. The first three file names do not parse correctly-- the second three parse correctly. As far as I can tell -- all six file names have exactly same formatting and structure.

Does anyone have a method for examining files names in windows to make sure that there are not hidden characters or symbols not allowed in Calibre?

Or any other techniques for importing files a little more robustly? I am a little frustrated that it looks like that this program is at a place where I could really start using it, but 4 out of 30 something files did not import correctly.

These are text files and I could truncate the bodies and send them out if it would help.

Thanks for any help. -glenn

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by GlennMaples

1) in 6.95 the "Test" button to test regex expressions for save/edit preferences does not seem to work.

I hate to say it, but it works for me. Make sure you have a valid ebook extension on your test filename - txt, pdf, etc. That's something I occasionally forget, and without the extension, it won't work.

2) I am having problems with getting an assortment of file names to parse correctly. In one case there was a file name with a "curly" apostrophe. I'm guessing that this is not allowed--but even when I copied it into notepad and recopied it into back into the windows file name editor with ' the file still did not parse correctly -- shows weird character instead of apostrophe and the rest of the parse did not complete.

3) even more troubling I have a series of files from the same source. The first three file names do not parse correctly-- the second three parse correctly. As far as I can tell -- all six file names have exactly same formatting and structure.

Can you post these troublesome filenames here? Put the character strings into a file and post the file?

[GlennMaples]

Starson17,

Good call and my mistake-- no extension on the filenames. I am not sure which emoticon best conveys abject shame.

Here are three sample files (contents truncated) to illustrate the issues I am having on import.

1) Castaways 06 -- imports fine.
2) Wizards Staff -- illustrates issue with apostrophe. The parsing continues on to the actual text inside the file.
3) Castaways 01 -- same structure as Castaways 06 but does not import correctly. Again, parsing falls through to the actual text inside the file rather than stopping at the filename. Interestingly, if I alter the text inside the file and save I can get it to parse correctly. But this behavior seems strange.

Thank you again for your help. Please let me know if I can help; I am a programmer in the .NET world.

-glenn

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by GlennMaples

Starson17,
Good call and my mistake-- no extension on the filenames. I am not sure which emoticon best conveys abject shame.

It's an easy mistake to make - as I said, I've made it many times

The parsing continues on to the actual text inside the file.

This indicates that you do not have the checkbox "Read metadata only from filename" checked in Preferences|Add/Save.

Without that checked, it tries to get metadata from the contents of the txt file, with unpredictable results. Select it and try again. They all worked for me.

I've forgotten how it tries to read metadata from the contents of a text file, probably it looks for "Author:" and "Title:"

Whatever it looks for, I don't find it useful and always turn on the checkbox to get metadata only from the filename when importing txt files.

[GlennMaples]

THANKS!!!!

That now makes sense -- really appreciate the help and will now try to do some serious importing-after I do some batch conversions on some file names.


-glenn