Have a Regular Expression problem with Author Field

[searcygr]

So, my son imported books into his Calibre library (using the latest version 3.31.0) and the Title was split across the title and author fields. For example: Vamps (Title) and Hollywood & Vein 01 (Author).

I am trying to use the Bulk Metadata Search/Replace to fix the problem. There are 800+ books that are affected and only the & in the title is causing a real problem.

In Search and replace Tab, I have the following:

Search Field: authors
Search For: ([A-Za-z\s\&].*)
Replace with: " \1" -- preceeding space required to display result properly with spaces
Destination field: title
Mode: Append to field
Split result (unchecked)
Values starting at 1 with values separated by :::

Book 1: Hollywood:::Vein 01 yields a test result of Vamps Hollywood Vein 01

Any ideas on what the Search for: should be (regular expression) to yield a
test result of Vamps Hollywood & Vein 01
???

Thanks in advance.

[kovidgoyal]

IIRC since & is a splitter for the author field so copying it in search replace is problematic. You could use a custom column built from other columns that uses the literal author value and then use that as the source instead of the authors field.

Or you can just re-read the metadata from inside the book files instead of the file names (the bulk metadata edit dialog has an option for that)

[searcygr]

I solved it. Everything is the same except I changed the following:
Search field: {template}
Template: {authors} <<-- Causes the entire author field to be picked up, ignores delimiters.