Help needed with an expression if possible

[chaley]

@penguinaka: avoiding quoting your post because that seems to offend you, what you accomplished is to offend someone who has given a great deal of time and energy to the calibre community. Manichean not only wrote the examples in the tutorial, he wrote the tutorial itself as well as contributing to other bits of the calibre manual. You rant about trolling and honesty instead of providing him useful guidance, which is what he asked for. You ask for help and say you are going to continue to ask for help, but refuse to provide help when asked for it.

You clearly have ideas about what the tutorial should and should not contain, and what is and is not useful. Provide guidance, provide examples, or even provide entire sections. Manichean accepts criticism he can work with, something amply demonstrated during the tutorial's 2-month writing/feedback cycle.

@curiosity: ask your questions! You are responsible for your question only, not what the rest of us have to say. And who knows, in the end something good might come of this discussion.

[itimpi]

One of the issues with any documentation in an Open Source project is that often those writing the documentation are either too aware of the issues to explain them in a way to those who are completely new, or alternativly they have other demands on their (valuable) free time.

penguinaka Much of the Calibre manual is actually written by users. If you can think of improvements then I suggest you write them up with the suggested text and submit them as potential manual alterations to Kovid. I have done this myself a few times and Kovid has always incorporated my new text (albeit sometimes with minor editing) into te manual.

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by curiosity

I have to laugh - I offered no criticism "I'm aware of the tut - if I were apt enough to understand it would be great unfortunately not as smart as some"

I didn't say "it was too difficult" to criticise you or anyone else - I simply said I was not apt enough to understand it, I'll say it in plainer English - I'm stupid when it comes to any type of coding or understanding code - I'm dumb - not as smart as some - perhaps I'm too thick to grasp the fundamentals - there fore I turn to my piers for assistance - or in this case got lucky seeing the code being used elsewhere"

You say you're too stupid (your words, not mine ) to understand the tutorial. It's intended for beginners with no previous experience, thus, people like you. So, to sum up, the tutorial in its current state is too difficult to achieve its purpose of teaching beginners how to use regular expressions.

[theducks]

That tutorial, beat through my dense skull, something I had failed to grasp for many years.
I will agree that there are way too many variations of REGEX
(the REGEX filters in my mail program only use a subset of what can be used in Calibre/Sigil)

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Manichean

It's intended for beginners with no previous experience, thus, people like you. So, to sum up, the tutorial in its current state is too difficult to achieve its purpose of teaching beginners how to use regular expressions.

Or perhaps you can sum up by saying the tutorial fails to succeed at teaching all beginners how to use regular expressions. However, IMHO, it succeeds at teaching some, and perhaps even - most beginners. That's a very valuable contribution even if you haven't managed the miracle you set your sights on.

[Debby]

First, there are never enough Thank you's to the many amazing people who patiently try to help others. I am humbled by your level of knowledge and dedication.

Second, many of the amazing features of Calibre require a certain level of programming for those who wish to take advantage of them. For those of us who are not programmers or who have limited experience, we should expect a steep learning curve. This community has been amazingly generous in sharing and helping others to learn. The tutorial is hard for a novice. But, what isn't? And more importantly, each time I read it I understand a bit more. So, thank you for taking the time to write it!

You know its an interesting concept having a tutorial, I learnt to drive a motor car many many years ago, during those years I developed certain skills, watching the traffic, driving in the rain etc etc - I'm sure most of you will get my drift.

My son comes of age and here it is my big chance to tutor someone how to drive.

Well guess what - I was a terrible teacher - what I thought was common sense wasn't for my son, what I felt he should know - well he didn't.

Another fault my son had was he didn't have the capacity to read my mind either - how dare he...

So cutting a long story short I gave up trying to teach a quite intelligent young man how to drive and did what I should have done in the first place - hired someone more apt and capable than I.

What may seem obvious to some is not necessarily so to others, what I know of a particular topic and subject may not be so obvious to others.

Reading a tutorial or a book on a topic that is foreign to say the least to a majority is not easy, when one doesn't have the fundamental skills to decipher what is and isn't appropriate.

Thats why we ask questions of those better equipped for answers once we have worked out that we are not capable of deducing them ourselves.

The simple thing would be not to post a reply pointing to get it yourself or work it out yourself if one is not prepared to offer an answer.

The wisest course of action is not to post anything.

I really do detest the attitude "well there it is in front of your face why can't you see the answer"...

Again I apologise for having asked a stupid question in the first place, I should have vested more days in becoming proficient in a coding language that I may only use a few more times.

I think I may just kick the next person that asks me a question and tell them to take some mind reading lessons.

I do thank the author of calibre for an excellent product and those who have helped/volunteered valuable time to make it an even better product. I have not yet seen a commercial product with even close to similar features.

In future I'll muse and try not to be a pain in the hard cover...

[penguinaka]

@Chaley: avoiding quotes...lol ... i think he "Manichean" was to quick to get offended... what he and others should have taken from my post was. We need a sticky so that regex ideas and solutions can be bounced back and forth since the manual is not enough or has examples that are aplicable to what is needed regardless of who volunteered their time and wrote it. So once again I was agreeing/stating, the Need For A Sticky, which was ignored in preference of condemning me for not liking the examples in the manual.

This is the post I was agreeing with:

Originally Posted by nynaevelan

Manichean:
Would it be possible to add some more real life examples to it? Or perhaps some of the more complex examples that power or advanced users are using? I know you add examples but maybe something more complex might be helpful. Or perhaps some sticky post in the forum of more commonly used reg expressions. Just a thought.

This was my post about the need for a sticky:

Originally Posted by penguinaka

I agree there needs to be a sticky where there is a list of expressions that work and can be added to. Reading and working with regular expressions is like trying to learn an alien language. Also the expressions change depending on what language. It appears that calibre uses python regex.

I downloaded regexbuddy 3. which helps you craft them but it seems like calibre just won't accept some stuff that it says is good.

Anyway a sticky would be great. because your examples in the manual sad to say suxor

I'm going to start a new thread because i have a few more complicated regex questions and i don't want it buried at the end of a thread. cheers. btw thanks for creating such a great program!

But it seems like a certain individual fixated on the word manual and suxor and then to be snide posted as if i were thanking him for creating calibre which he knows I wasn't it was just a shout out to the developers.

Also I'll say this a sticky would be very useful for people looking for a quick solution than having to wait for a version update of a manual that may or may not come.

So I think I will wait for the sticky and post my regex suggestions in it then whoever can take it from there to the manual if they like.

@itimpi: I agree..thanks for pointing that out... but i'm more interested in trading thoughts and regex in a RegEx Sticky. Cheers.

@Curiosity: Nicely said. Seems like peoples egos inflate with their post count in some cases. I just ignore them most of the time except for a an occasional slap when i feel they deserve it.

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by penguinaka

We need a sticky so that regex ideas and solutions can be bounced back and forth since the manual is not enough or has examples that are aplicable to what is needed regardless of who volunteered their time and wrote it.

A side note to this: I won't make a non-locked sticky. Those tended to be used as catch-all topics while we had them in the old forum structure, which is why we decided just to have locked stickys. The regex example thread would be the same.

[penguinaka]

Originally Posted by Manichean

A side note to this: I won't make a non-locked sticky. Those tended to be used as catch-all topics while we had them in the old forum structure, which is why we decided just to have locked stickys. The regex example thread would be the same.

right on... thanks for taking the time to reply. understood.

[Manichean]

An update: I announced earlier that I would have time to post (an early version of) the regex example and compendium thread. Most probably that won't be the case, because of Real Life. I'm sorry, but I'll try to get something done as soon as possible.

@Debby: Thanks for sending me your spreadsheet, I'll make sure to give you credit.
@Everyone else: If you have any regexes you feel should be included, post them here or PM me.

My idea was to split the thread into multiple posts, the first one being an index post, the other ones listing regexes for different applications within Calibre, grouped by application. I think it would make sense to have one post for conversion search & replace, one for bulk metadata search & replace and one for importing books.
Comments and thoughts?

[Debby]

Manichean,

Please don't give me the credit. Most were from posts in the forum. Sorry that I did not note the original authors, hopefully you will all recognize your work.

I like your idea of the index post that is grouped. It would make it much easier to follow. Penguinaka's examples are also very helpful!

[travger]

Are the things I must type in 'search' also something like regular expressions? If yes, then maybe there should be one post for them - I have several times seen people asking how to find books without covers (cover:false). I don't use typed search very much because always I need to search forum (for hour sometimes) to find what I typed wrong.
If it's nothing to do with regex, please kindly disregard my naiveté.

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by travger

Are the things I must type in 'search' also something like regular expressions? If yes, then maybe there should be one post for them - I have several times seen people asking how to find books without covers (cover:false). I don't use typed search very much because always I need to search forum (for hour sometimes) to find what I typed wrong.
If it's nothing to do with regex, please kindly disregard my naiveté.

You can use regular expressions for searching, however, normal search expressions are not regular expressions. If you prefix the search text with a tilde ('~'), then you're in regular expression mode.
That said, I'd rather not include search expressions, but if there are clever searches using regular expressions, I'll think about it.

I should be able to get something started this evening.

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Manichean

If you prefix the search text with a tilde ('~'), then you're in regular expression mode.
That said, I'd rather not include search expressions, but if there are clever searches using regular expressions, I'll think about it.

I find it odd that you would exclude search expressions from a regex tutorial. I find that I use them quite often.

They are particularly useful for searching for subtle errors in the title/author. For example, looking for double spaces:

title:"~\s\s"

finds them, but this won't work:

title:"  "

Or suppose I want to look at all the books where the author's last name starts with B:

author_sort:"~^B.*"