Regex help needed, selecting single tags out of namy

[Sidetrack]

I'm having some trouble, I have a number of tags all prefixed with "QC: " that I'd like to extract from the tags column and dump into a custom tags column.

I can get at the tags I want just fine with (^QC[:] [^,]*) but I can't seem to come up regex to exclude the preceding and following tags so I can dump only the QC tags into the custom column.

Any ideas? I'd really rather not apply them one at a time from the edit metadata interface.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Sidetrack

I'm having some trouble, I have a number of tags all prefixed with "QC: " that I'd like to extract from the tags column and dump into a custom tags column.

I can get at the tags I want just fine with (^QC[:] [^,]*) but I can't seem to come up regex to exclude the preceding and following tags so I can dump only the QC tags into the custom column.

Any ideas? I'd really rather not apply them one at a time from the edit metadata interface.

Assume this is in Search and replace

<not tested>
Matches anything up to your term, your term, matches anything after your term

(.*)your search term(.*)

the replace into destination column: \2

[chaley]

Note that searching multiple fields like tags does a search tag by tag. If a search does not match, the value is not touched.

If you want to search tags (which will probably work best), then you must get fancy with the search expression so that it always matches the entire tag. Try

^(QC[:] .*|).*?$

This expression ensures that \1 either contains the complete tag or the empty string.

You can avoid the multiple-item processing by using "template" as the source field and "{tags}" as the template. In this case something like your expression would work, but you must not use the anchor to take care of the case where QT is not the first tag. In addition, it would probably be easier to remove the unwanted tags than to reconstruct the list of wanted tags.

[Sidetrack]

Originally Posted by theducks

Assume this is in Search and replace

<not tested>
Matches anything up to your term, your term, matches anything after your term

(.*)your search term(.*)

the replace into destination column: \2

Yes it is in Seach and Replace. That is the method I tried and it doesn't seem to work with multiple tags.

[theducks]

Originally Posted by Sidetrack

Yes it is in Seach and Replace. That is the method I tried and it doesn't seem to work with multiple tags.

Chaley pointed out (and he really in the know here) that tags are really multiple single items (records in the DB).

[Sidetrack]

Using the {tags} template worked wonderfully. Removing tags will be no problem, if search and replace won't do the trick I don't mind removing them manually.