Bulk Edit Remove Leading Characters

[Rainybeet]

First the question, then some details.

In the Search and Replace function for multiple book editing is there a way to signify generic numbers, characters, or place value? The standard characters * and # do not seem to work, but I never learned Python and cannot seem to find a quick answer anywhere.

Now my specific problem:

Trying to organize my library I often run into titles that have a bunch of junk at the beginning or the end, especially series information, which usually has numbers.

A simple example would be:

01 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
02 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
03 Life, the Universe and Everything
04 So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish

In bulk edit, how can I remove the numbers and the space of all four books at the same time?

Ideally I would be able to remove the first three characters, no matter what they are, so that I could edit multiple series at the same time, or series with slightly different formatting.

I did discover that using a regular expression I can put in (0.) in the search field, but this does not work if I am trying to edit many books that have slightly different formatting, and if the numbers go into the 10s, 20s, or higher then I have to do another edit for each different leading number. Also, if the books are formatted as follows:

Hitchhikers 1 The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
Hitchhikers 2 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Hitchhikers 3 Life, the Universe and Everything
Hitchhikers 4 So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish

then I cannot type in (Hitchhikers ....) or else the first book would return "The Guide to the Galaxy."

This is why I really would like to just the number of leading characters that I specify.

Thank you for any help.

[Rainybeet]

I found an answer to the most basic of my questions, how to remove characters from the front of a title, or any other field.

The code is just ^..... with the number of periods being the number of characters you want to remove.

It is not a perfect answer, I would still love to know how to add generic characters into a search string so I could edit with a bit more precision, but at least it is a start.

[BookJunkieLI]

This will remove all numbers at the beginning of a line of text

^[0-9]+

In the examples you gave you'll still have an empty space at the beginning of the title. Just add a space at the end of the above code and it will remove it.

To breakdown how it works:

The ^ character says to start at the beginning of the line.

The [0-9] says to look for a number

The + says to keep going until it hits something other than a number.

[JSWolf]

Question, where did these Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy eBooks come from? I've never seen retail copies that have numbers in front of the titles either in the filename or in the metadata.

[Rainybeet]

The Hitchhiker's books were just something I made up as a recognizable example. All of my Hitchhikers copies are in paper form and are at least 20 years old.

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by Rainybeet

The Hitchhiker's books were just something I made up as a recognizable example. All of my Hitchhikers copies are in paper form and are at least 20 years old.

One thing you could do if it's just the first word that needs to go, just use regex to remove up to and including the first space. I'm not up on the brand of regex used by Calibre so I'm sure someone else can pipe in with the code for this.