Can I remove the first x characters from titles in bulk?

[statusneo]

I have imported a collection of books that all have titles of the form

0192801619.Collection.Of.Interesting.Books.Title1
0192350040.Collection.Of.Interesting.Books.Title2
0199876894.Collection.Of.Interesting.Books.Title3
etc...

The number is different for every book but the number of digits in the number is the same. '.Collection.Of.Interesting.Books." appears in every title. The remainder of each title is different for each book, including different numbers of characters.

I would like to run a batch editing tool that will delete the first x characters of every title such that only the Title part is left. Can Calibre do this or is there another utility?

Thank you!

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by statusneo

I would like to run a batch editing tool that will delete the first x characters of every title such that only the Title part is left. Can Calibre do this or is there another utility?

Thank you!

Look at Bulk Metadata Edit -> Search & Replace. In regex mode, it would probably be something like [0-9]*\.Collection.Of.Interesting.Books\.

Note that any changes you make there are irreversible, so backup your library...

[BookJunkieLI]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

Look at Bulk Metadata Edit -> Search & Replace. In regex mode, it would probably be something like [0-9]*\.Collection.Of.Interesting.Books\.

Note that any changes you make there are irreversible, so backup your library...

The Bulk Edit Metadata field does have a test area but if you want to be absolutely sure before you make any changes OpenOffice/LibreOffice does allow you to use regex in the Find & Replace function so you can test it out there without affecting your library at all.