Search & Replace Suggestion

[Philosopher]

I had a suggestion for a future update regarding the search and replace function.

Here is the scenario I am considering. Often when I import books the isbn shows up as the title.

It would be nice if in the search & replace page you could have a way to replace one field with another.

Sounds simple enough.

[chaley]

You already can do this, but only in regular expression mode. See the attached screen shot.

[Philosopher]

Ah! Great. I didn't notice that option.

Thanks. Perhaps you can tell me if there is an easy way to edit the string being matched. I know there are a large number of expressions - but is there one that can concatenate a string - say removing the last four characters - or that can take only x number of characters from the left (or right)?

Appreciate your help.

[Philosopher]

I know that I can, for example, do this from the left.

If I put in the expression [10] I get the ten characters from the left.

Is there a way to do the opposite - get the ten characters from the right?

[Philosopher]

I take that back on the [10] - misunderstood the output.

But I have been successful in finding some ways to accomplish my goal. Still it would be good to know if I could concatenate a string or if I could take only x number of characters from left or right.

[chaley]

S/R has both the template language and full regular expressions available, so there is very little you cannot do. See http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/template_lang.html and http://calibre-ebook.com/user_manual/regexp.html.

From your example you appear to be using the template language. To get the first 10 characters of a field, use {field:shorten(10,,0)}. To get the last 10, use {field:shorten(0,,10)}. The shorten function (and several others) is documented in the manual referred to above.

Note that you can also grab the first up-to-ten characters using a regexp. The search expression would be

(.{1,10}).*

The replace expression would be

\1

[Philosopher]

Thanks so much. Really helps.