Regex expression to edit series when saving books to disk not working.

[Varo]

Hello,

All my series have non-english characters in them and the english part is enclosed by square brackets.

Example of a series name: 魔法科高校の劣等生 [Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei]

I want to be able to change this using the template and only have the english part of the series name like this: Mahouka Koukou no Rettousei

Towards that end I tried using this:

{series:re('[^\x00-\x7F]+', '')}/{title}

It would replace all non english characters with nothing. However it does not seem to work. Additionally, if I try to also remove the square brackets in the regex expression like this:

{series:re('[^\x00-\x7F]+|\[|\]', '')}/{title}

I get an invalid format specifier error eventhough the regex exp should be fine.

Any help would be really appreciated.

[kovidgoyal]

the regex runs on unicode not bytes. You want to use \uXXXX for unicode characters

[theducks]

Just capture each character type group and don't use that group in the replace

If you want to capture reserved symbols, they must be escaped:

(\[foo, bar\])

Replacements do not need to be in the order captured.
\2 - \5 - \1 (notice that I did not use \3 or \4)

[Varo]

Originally Posted by kovidgoyal

the regex runs on unicode not bytes. You want to use \uXXXX for unicode characters

Originally Posted by theducks

Just capture each character type group and don't use that group in the replace

If you want to capture reserved symbols, they must be escaped:

(\[foo, bar\])

Replacements do not need to be in the order captured.
\2 - \5 - \1 (notice that I did not use \3 or \4)

Thank you very much. Combining advice from the both of you I achieved my goal with this:

{series: re([^\u0000-\u007F]+|[\u005B-\u005D]+, )}