[GUI Plugin] Quality Check

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by bluepiggy42

Any thought on how I can us the quality check; search epubs function to look for the title of the book within the body of the book?

I'm am not a tech person in the least....so I am sure that i'm not even close. I've tried:

<title>
(?P<title>.+)
(title)

Thank you!!!! I love this function and use the search epubs all the time.
Christa

If you use Windows then this is another way to search EPUB contents ==>> Content Search EPUB

My experience is that the indexing using default settings has no discernible effect on calibre performance or functionality on 100,000K book libraries. Search response is pretty much instantaneous, you can 'post the results' to calibre via the Drop Search Results plugin - which will Mark the Books, and from there you can tag, add to reading lists, save , send etc, etc.

BR

[edeniz]

I have a question regarding the plugin:

Is there any way to do a search and have the plugin disregard the difference between plain and typographic punctuation? Because that small but important difference is a hindrance to the "search epub" option of the plugin.

This is why this question has come up for me:

Some time ago, I was trying to figure out which ebook among the several hundreds I have a certain quote was from. I was pretty sure I remembered the sentence verbatim, and just in case tried out several possible variations, so as to help me find the correct ebook with the help of the quality check plugin's "search epubs" feature.

I couldn't find the book, so I gave up. Several days later, I *accidentally* found the correct book, and noticed this:

The quote I tried to search was indeed verbatim. The reason why the plugin would not find the ebook is the fact that the apostrophes in the quote were typographic ones instead of the plain ones, and me using the plain ones in the phrase I searched with caused the plugin to disregard the ebook.

So is there any way to make sure that problem never pops up again?

Thank you kindly!

[Rob557]

Originally Posted by edeniz

Is there any way to do a search and have the plugin disregard the difference between plain and typographic punctuation? Because that small but important difference is a hindrance to the "search epub" option of the plugin .... the apostrophes in the quote were typographic ones instead of the plain ones

The following are some pragmatic suggestions now that you have pointed out the potential search problem, pending any changes that someone could make to the "search epub" plugin itself:
a) although not specifically what you are referring to, there is already a "plain text content" option that can be selected so that html format features such as italics etc are disregarded in the search, but that does not currently resolve the difference between plain and typographic punctuation; there is also an option to "ignore case" so that capitalization does not matter in the search,
b) when searching for specific text, perhaps choose sections of text that do not include punctuation such as apostrohes,
c) if it is necessary to use search text that does include quotation marks and/or apostrophes, then for each occurrence of such punctuation, maybe include specific alternatives in your search request in the form of [\'\’ \"\“\”] for each occurrence,
d) perhaps the plugin could have a seach option that ignores all punctuation and spaces and line breaks?

[BetterRed]

IIRC the epub viewer's Find feature has similar behaviour wrt apostrophes and quote marks. I would not be surprised if QCs search didn't use the same code as the viewer's Find.

I use Windows Search in conjunction with the Drop Search Results plugin, it seems to find curly quotes etc when straight ones are typed in its search box.

To search EPUBs you need to install an EPUB iFilter, see ==>> Content Search EPUB. WS is fast and it doesn't clog up calibre with indexes or extraneous formats. And you can widen the search to include non calibre objects - emails, spreadsheets, presentations, documents etc.

The equivalent on a Mac is Spotlight, there's a thread somewhere on MR about using it with calibre.

BR

[edeniz]

Thank you kindly for your answers, Rob557 and BetterRed! Much appreciated!

While I'm glad it wasn't a case of me overlooking an obvious feature of the plugin, it's sad that this is a weakness of this otherwise great plugin.

It's not always applicable to just choose a part of a sentence that doesn't have punctuation and the like, because what do you do when the only part you are 100% certain on is something that does include them?

But thank you kindly for the tips! Especially the idea with using variants of the typographic punctuation in the search in future. That certainly would have helped a lot if I had thought about it at the time. Unfortunately, because I tend to make sure to edit all my ebooks so that they all have plain punctuation, the few times I do miss doing that edit, it trips me up like this.

If the plugin could be modified to ignore all typographic punctuation that would be so great! I wonder if it's doable.


BetterRed: Yeah, the viewer has that selfsame behaviour.

Thank you kindly for the link! But I'm guessing it won't be applicable for me, since my OS is Ubuntu. And the system standard search tool in ubuntu doesn't allow for epubs to be searched anyway, hence why I am using the quality check plugin. Maybe there are other search tools that do allow for epub searching and I just haven't found them yet? Hmm...

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by edeniz

It's not always applicable to just choose a part of a sentence that doesn't have punctuation and the like, because what do you do when the only part you are 100% certain on is something that does include them?

I usually can't remember phrases verbatim anyway so I tend to use regex.

e.g.
prophecy.+mule

[edeniz]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

I usually can't remember phrases verbatim anyway so I tend to use regex.

e.g.
prophecy.+mule

To be frank, I'm never sure which regex will actually work with QC, so I seldom even try.

Which ones work for you? Aside from example above?

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by edeniz

To be frank, I'm never sure which regex will actually work with QC, so I seldom even try.

Interesting. I've never actually had a problem with using regex in Quality Check's Search ePubs function. Any regex mistake has usually been due to PEBKAC. I do tend to limit search scope to selected books (usually filtered by tags) or virtual libraries so it's not wasting time going through the entire library.

Originally Posted by edeniz

Which ones work for you? Aside from example above?

For the most part, I just use it to find books with certain phrases similar to above:

Scope: Plain text content
\b(word1|word2).+word3

The other thing I use it for is to find epubs with <img> tags referencing http resources (so I can use Tweak epub to download all external links).

Scope: HTML content
<img[^>]+src=['"]http

[edeniz]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

Interesting. I've never actually had a problem with using regex in Quality Check's Search ePubs function. Any regex mistake has usually been due to PEBKAC.

Yeah, that goshdarn PEBKAC error is something I encounter far too frequently too. Especially in regards to regex use. For me, it's always a lot of struggle to figure out which ones will work best, or whether there is any limitations to regex use in the software, be it an text editor or a search tool or whatever.

It's been a while, so I don't remember what I tried to use, but some regex or other that usually worked for me didn't for QC, so I've been basically doing without because I didn't have the patience to deal with it. Guess I should shelf my assumptions and revisit my decision to do without regex.

Thank you kindly for the tips!

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by edeniz

It's been a while, so I don't remember what I tried to use, but some regex or other that usually worked for me didn't for QC, so I've been basically doing without because I didn't have the patience to deal with it. Guess I should shelf my assumptions and revisit my decision to do without regex.

I've had regex issues with complicated save to disk templates as well. However, I find it works well enough for simple regex queries. Thus far, all my Search ePubs queries have been simple (mostly looking for previously read titles wherein I only remember certain keywords or phrases).

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by edeniz

Thank you kindly for the link! But I'm guessing it won't be applicable for me, since my OS is Ubuntu. And the system standard search tool in ubuntu doesn't allow for epubs to be searched anyway, hence why I am using the quality check plugin. Maybe there are other search tools that do allow for epub searching and I just haven't found them yet? Hmm...

Have a look at Docfetcher and Recoll IIRC they can search EPUBs.

There's a calibre plugin for Recoll integration - link in the Plugin Index. It has been abandoned, so it is not compatible with recent versions of calibre, but you might be able to resurrect it.

And try a search for Lucene, its a widely used search engine for *x platforms.

Added: IIRC the Multi-column search plugin has content search capabilities, I've not used it, but its developer is very active, so if it exhibits the same behaviour there's a good chance he'll fix it.

BR

[ilovejedd]

Originally Posted by BetterRed

Added: IIRC the Multi-column search plugin has content search capabilities, I've not used it, but its developer is very active, so if it exhibits the same behaviour there's a good chance he'll fix it.

I do use MCS full text search quite a bit. Note, it can't search for text in ePub. It has to be plain TXT files.

[BetterRed]

Originally Posted by ilovejedd

I do use MCS full text search quite a bit. Note, it can't search for text in ePub. It has to be plain TXT files.

Yeah, that's what I had in mind when I wrote: "WS is fast and it doesn't clog up calibre with indexes or extraneous formats."

BR

[RonBall42]

You have a function to search for Adobe DRM and DRM in ebooks. What is the string you are searching for? I am getting books listed that do not contain DRM.

[RonBall42]

Originally Posted by RonBall42

You have a function to search for Adobe DRM and DRM in ebooks. What is the string you are searching for? I am getting books listed that do not contain DRM.

So, more research and I answered it myself ... I installed the plugin "Modify Epub", and it will remove them the DRM meta tags for me. Works great!