Keyboard Shortcut in Regex?

[Turtle91]

I'm still trying to figure out a way to convert text to Title Case without having to manually select the text each time....short of writing a plugin to include formulaic regex like Calibre uses.

I have TitleCase assigned as a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Space) and wondered if there was a way to use that shortcut in the 'replace' section of the regex...resulting in something like:

find: (?<=\<h2\>)(.*?)(?=\</h2\>)
replace: Ctrl+Space

[hobnail]

What's so special about the keyboard shortcut? I use the following saved search:

find: <h([\d]+)>(.)(.*)</h[\d]+>
replace: <h\1>\2\L\3</h\1>

[hobnail]

I'm certainly no regexp wizard; what's the ?<= at the beginning of the h2 match doing? And why do you have backslashes in front of the < and >?

[hobnail]

I'm so used to typing [\d]+ and I just noticed that I used it here; probably could remove the square brackets as well as the plus sign.

find: <h(\d)>(.)(.*)</h\d>

But at least I'm ready for when the HTML standard adds an h10 tag.

[DiapDealer]

Originally Posted by hobnail

I'm certainly no regexp wizard; what's the ?<= at the beginning of the h2 match doing? And why do you have backslashes in front of the < and >?

That's a regex lookbehind.
He's just escaping the the angle brackets with the backslash--though there's no real reason to since they aren't regex metacharacters to begin with.

How does your regex deal with more than one word between the h tags?

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That's a regex lookbehind.
He's just escaping the the angle brackets with the backslash--though there's no real reason to since they aren't regex metacharacters to begin with.

How does your regex deal with more than one word between the h tags?

Duh, I missed that. I always do sentence case, never title case unless it's a proper name of someone/something.

Even though I was born and raised in the US I was taught that sentence case is better. E.g., see https://atmosol.com/resource-post/he...sentence-case/. Ease of regex construction for it is now another argument in its favor.

[Turtle91]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

That's a regex lookbehind.
He's just escaping the the angle brackets with the backslash--though there's no real reason to since they aren't regex metacharacters to begin with.

How does your regex deal with more than one word between the h tags?

lol - I actually was trying to get the lookarounds to work and forgot to remove the escapes after I found the actual problem

Yes, I am trying to get Title Case rather than Sentence case. This would be the first step, followed by a pass to change ' Of ', ' And ', ' The ', etc. to 'of, and, the. I'm sure there are plenty of other exceptions that I haven't come across yet...

[hobnail]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I'm sure there are plenty of other exceptions that I haven't come across yet...

Mine doesn't handle the occasional quoted phrase that is sometimes in a header.

[DiapDealer]

And to officially answer the original question: no. I'm afraid you can't fire off a keyboard shortcut with regex. I'd love to be able to say differently, but I can't.

And even a straight-up capitalize the first letter of every word (making sure everything else is lower-case) between two tags is going to very difficult to pull off with S&R regex alone.

[Tex2002ans]

Originally Posted by Turtle91

I have TitleCase assigned as a keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+Space) and wondered if there was a way to use that shortcut in the 'replace' section of the regex...resulting in something like:

There are a few solutions I see here.

1. Use Calibre's Functions. An example is even given in the manual:

"Automatically fixing the case of headings in the document"

2. AutoHotKey. If I want to "speed up" annoying shortcuts, I sometimes assign one of the extra buttons on my mouse.

For example, this AutoHotKey line:

XButton2::^q

assigns Ctrl+q to one of my side mouse buttons.

Then a (previously annoying) click+shortcut combo becomes a simple:

1. Left-Click
2. Side-Click
3. Left-Click
4. [...]

If you want to get fancy, you could even have AutoHotKey click the "Find" button for you too! Then all you have to do is keep pressing the side button!

Originally Posted by hobnail

Even though I was born and raised in the US I was taught that sentence case is better. E.g., see https://atmosol.com/resource-post/he...sentence-case/. Ease of regex construction for it is now another argument in its favor.

Don't know if you missed it, but there was quite a bit of Title Casing discussion in this topic a few months ago:

"Add title="" to h* based on existing TOC -- suggestion for new feature (or plugin?)"

Especially see my Posts #11, #13, and #15.

(I even spent a day writing up the ultimate "Title Casing: Everything You Didn't Know You Ever Wanted to Know" post... yet to be released though.*)

Originally Posted by Turtle91

Yes, I am trying to get Title Case rather than Sentence case. This would be the first step, followed by a pass to change ' Of ', ' And ', ' The ', etc. to 'of, and, the. I'm sure there are plenty of other exceptions that I haven't come across yet...

Yes, lots of exceptions, especially in Chicago's rules.

But even with "easy" Sentence Case, you have to take into account things like:

• Proper Names
• Roman Numerals
• Acronyms
• Previous Punctuation
• etc.

... It's all mentioned in my ultimate guide.*

- - - - -

(* If anyone's interested, I could send you the rough draft via PM... or you could wait until my blog gets rolling! )