Author and Series in Authors field

[Azrael1018]

I have a LOT of books that I loaded into Calibre wrong. Many now have Author and Series Name & No in the Authors field.

Example: David Drake - Books of the Elements 01

or: JR Ward - [Black Dagger Brotherhood 03] - Lover Awakened

Is there a way to bulk edit using Regex to move the series info to the series field and leave author in authors field.

Also, Title/Series in Title field.

Example: Buckley, Michael - [Sisters Grimm 01] - The Fairy-Tale Detectives

or: [Earth's Children 06] - The Land of Painted Caves

or: The Wishing Horse Of Oz - Oz 29

Don't know much about Regex but willing to learn

Thanks in advance,

Dave

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Azrael1018

I have a LOT of books that I loaded into Calibre wrong. Many now have Author and Series Name & No in the Authors field.

Example: David Drake - Books of the Elements 01

or: JR Ward - [Black Dagger Brotherhood 03] - Lover Awakened

Is there a way to bulk edit using Regex to move the series info to the series field and leave author in authors field.

Also, Title/Series in Title field.

Example: Buckley, Michael - [Sisters Grimm 01] - The Fairy-Tale Detectives

or: [Earth's Children 06] - The Land of Painted Caves

or: The Wishing Horse Of Oz - Oz 29

Don't know much about Regex but willing to learn

Thanks in advance,

Dave

Yes, you can bulk edit with search and replace in a bulk metadata edit screen (hit "E" after selecting multiple books). If you've just added them, you might prefer to just delete them, and add them a bit more carefully, rather than try to clean up the mess, but it's up to you. You can do a lot of damage with Search and Replace on an existing library if you aren't careful. It's harder to damage a library with Adding Books, and both methods need some regex skill.

[Azrael1018]

I guess I was looking for some Regex expressions that might do the trick.

Regex has me a little confused and examples would help. The Calibre tutorial did not seem to tutor me much (:

Dave

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by Azrael1018

I guess I was looking for some Regex expressions that might do the trick.

Regex has me a little confused and examples would help. The Calibre tutorial did not seem to tutor me much (:

Dave

I still suggest removing and Adding again. If you do that, you can easily put the author, series and series index into the correct field. S&R works best for fixing one field, or moving one field into one other

for:
JR Ward - [Black Dagger Brotherhood 03] - Lover Awakened
in the title, you can use

(.*) - .*

as the search
and

\1

as the destination into the author field.

Then you'll need to do the series and series_index fields, then fix the title field. It would be easier to just add that file with an Add regex to do all 4 fields correctly in one shot. I suspect you didn't get examples as no one wanted to give all the permutations for all the steps for all the different file naming schemes you have for both S&R and Add Books until they knew what approach you wanted to take (S&R or Add Books).

There are lots of Add Books regex expressions posted here that will work on many of your files.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Azrael1018

I guess I was looking for some Regex expressions that might do the trick.

Regex has me a little confused and examples would help. The Calibre tutorial did not seem to tutor me much (:

Dave

This (sticky: https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=118570) pounded REGEX through my thick skull .

On the Bulk Metadata edit form, the S&R tab has a 'test' area, so you get to see the results before you apply them.
I note, more than 1 naming style,.: Only work on one_style_at_a_time (select those books to bulk edit)
Single solutions are very complicated and usually can be avoide by crafting individual (problem) solutions

[Starson17]

I'll comment that there are three strategies for dealing with this issue.

1) Import filenames (they usually end up in the title or with title/author swapped) and fix the mess with S&R. I don't recommend this one.

2) Import with a regex for Add Books that correctly parses the filename into the right fields. This is what I did, but it may require you to change the regex for different filename structures.

3) Rename the files before import to a standard form, then use the same regex every time for Add Books. There are many bulk file rename tools out there, and some are specific to ebooks. If you are willing to learn to use these rename tools, this works well. Of course, the best ones use .... you guessed it ... regex

[Azrael1018]

Thanks to all who replied. I now have some good ideas on how to fix things.

I will be very careful in the future when adding new books

Dave