How do I populate a custom field on import?

[himitsuhieki]

My files are in this order
Lastname, Firstname - [Series 02] - Book title
and Lastname, Firstname - [Series name 01] - Book Title [read]

I want to have any book marked [read] to show in the custom column I created on import so I do not have to manually edit them.

I found these snippets from a penguinaka that work well for importing the books but not sure how to deal with the custom column.

^(?P<author>[^-]+)(\s*-\s*(\[?(?P<series>[^-0-9]+)\s*(?P<series_index>[0-9.]+)?]?)?)?.*?-\s*(?P<title>[^\]{[()]+\w)

this one removes all brackets around the series and anything in brackets in the title section doesn't get imported imported


^(?P<author>[^-]+)(\s*-\s*(\[?(?P<series>[^-0-9]+)\s*(?P<series_index>[0-9.]+)?]?)?)?.*?-\s*(?P<title>[^-]+)

this one removes brackets around the series section but leaves things in brackets in the title so you get version information imported with the title

[speakingtohe]

Perhaps not what you are looking for, but if you do a search for [read], drag those files to calibre and then bulk edit to populate the read column.

Helen

[Manichean]

You can only import into the columns shown in the add books preferences screen. You can, however, import into another column and use bulk metadata edit to move (parts of) the columns content to your custom column.

[himitsuhieki]

Ok. Will try that thanks

[b00jum]

Originally Posted by Manichean

You can only import into the columns shown in the add books preferences screen. You can, however, import into another column and use bulk metadata edit to move (parts of) the columns content to your custom column.

How exactly do you do that? All I see in the bulk metadata edit is a search/replace function, no move/copy as far as I can tell.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by b00jum

How exactly do you do that? All I see in the bulk metadata edit is a search/replace function, no move/copy as far as I can tell.

Replace allows you to choose Where and How to do it

[Manichean]

Originally Posted by b00jum

How exactly do you do that? All I see in the bulk metadata edit is a search/replace function, no move/copy as far as I can tell.

In regular expression search mode, you can use backreferences in the replace text. Also, your destination field doesn't have to match the source field.

[b00jum]

Originally Posted by theducks

Replace allows you to choose Where and How to do it

Sorry - I didn't see that you had to change the search mode to 'regular expression' in order to get a destination field.

Still - the feature to import into a custom field would make a good feature request.