regex for filename with muliple dots? (adding books)

[kite]

SOLVED Trying to get a regex for filename with variable number of dots (<2).

I get the following from the tutorial and other threads, (thanks to Starson17 for all your generous contributions):
Untick, "Read metadata from file contents rather than file name"
and the regular expression
Firstauthorname SurnameAuthor - Title.pdf
works with
(?P<author>[^_]+) - (?P<title>.+)
while
Firstauthorname SurnameAuthor. Title.pdf
works with
(?P<author>[^_]+)\. (?P<title>.+)

However
Firstauthorname SurnameAuthor. Title A. Title B. Title C. Title D. Volume 2..pdf
doesn't work with anything I can find.

I want everything between the first "dot white space" and ".pdf" to be read as the title.

Real life example of file name:
Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Roman Antiquities, IV. Books VI.49-VII.pdf

How do I modify
(?P<author>[^_]+)\. (?P<title>.+)
so it ignores special characters after the first dot?

[susan_cassidy]

You normally have to escape a period in a regex. Like this: \.. Otherwise it means any character.

[kite]

Further experimenting reveals that it is not the "." dots that are the problem.
Filename: Agog Delm. Try This........WouldYou..FDasdf...pdf
gives;
Title: Try This........WouldYou..FDasdf..
Author: Agog Delm
Just as I want.

Edited: But any more dots next to spaces (after the first ". space" following the title) messes things up.

[JustForFun]

Does (?P<author>.+?)\. (?P<title>.+) work for you? It considers all characters before the first dot followed by a space as author and the rest as title.

Regexes are greedy by default which means that (?P<author>[^_]+)\. matches all characters (which are not '_') before the last dot followed by a space as author. See the note under Hey, neat! This is starting to make sense! in the tutorial on regexes.

[BetterRed]

I would fix the file names to match the pattern I have selected in the Add Books config.

File renamers are a dime a dozen, some have regex facilities, almost all feature a preview and many have an exclude.

If I wanted to retain the existing filenames, I would create hardlinks, rename and add them to calibre and then trash 'em.

BR

[kite]

Originally Posted by JustForFun

Does (?P<author>.+?)\. (?P<title>.+) work for you? It considers all characters before the first dot followed by a space as author and the rest as title.
...

Thanks for your help people.

(?P<author>.+?)\. (?P<title>.+) does the trick nicely.

And having read "Hey neat ... " for the fifth time has me thinking that I could have made the + in the first phrase of (?P<author>[^_]+)\. (?P<title>.+) non-greedy by adding a ? just so (?P<author>[^_]+?)\. (?P<title>.+)

"Regexes are greedy by default which means that (?P<author>[^_]+)\. matches all characters (which are not '_') before the last dot followed by a space as author."
I had tried many combinations and permutations but all in the second phrase of the expression as I ASSumed that the first phrase stopped matching at the first "\. "

My grasp of regular expressions doesn't let me create and use them in Bulk File Rename yet.