Commas in some of the Author's name fields

[Dragonhomer]

I am trying to clean-up my mother's Calibre - she requested that I go through and check that all the series titles are correct, that she has all the titles from that author and that I remove any author that hasn't written a book in the past 5 years.

It is quite the job, but I am doing this as a birthday present for her (at her request). But in doing this I am finding some of the authors are listed both ways - First Name Last Name as well as Last Name, First Name.

I have calibre sorting author names by first name, last name. but, for some reason, some of the author names are Last Name, First Name

I want to do a search to find the books that have the author listed as Last Name, First Name, then I can run the "Quality Check" plug in to fix those.

Tried search for , (comma space) in the Author name field - it gives me all the authors

Tried search for , (comma space) in the Author_Sort field - I get all the authors

Tried search for , (comma space) in Advanced_Search - again all the authors

Anyone have any suggestions? My mom is picky, and wants everything "correct" so she can easily move all the books from an author to her iPad. Since she has so many books in Calibre, she just moves books from one author or one series over at a time (it is easier for her this way).

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[chaley]

Two ways I can think of:

• Get the Quality Check plugin. It has tools to find books with authors with and without commas.
• A way that I prefer: use Manage Authors (right-click on Authors in the tag browser) then "filter" for comma. This will find all authors containing a comma. You can then fix them however you want, and all books with those authors will automatically be changed.

[mbovenka]

The Quality Check plugin can find them for you (Check Metadata -> Check authors with commas)

[theducks]

Originally Posted by mbovenka

The Quality Check plugin can find them for you (Check Metadata -> Check authors with commas)

And then it can FIX them (select first). It flips the selected.
The only time it fails is when the is a mix in {authors}

[chaley]

Originally Posted by theducks

And then it can FIX them (select first). It flips the selected.
The only time it fails is when the is a mix in {authors}

Note that it fixes the author for the selected book(s), not globally. It isn't hard to end up with both Joe Blogs and Blogs, Joe.

[Dragonhomer]

THANK YOU everyone for the assistance. Your suggestions help me get that part of the clean up done.

[giannib]

filter not search for ,

[giannib]

From a big import, I have many authors as Name, Surname
in manage authors this is proper in the "author sort" field, but it's wrong in the Author field
Quality check doesnt do anything

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by giannib

From a big import, I have many authors as Name, Surname
in manage authors this is proper in the "author sort" field, but it's wrong in the Author field
Quality check doesnt do anything

If I understand correctly, you have:

George, Orwell - author
Douglas, Adams - author

Orwell, George - author sort
Adams, Douglas - author sort

Quality check swapping tool would give you Orwell George and Adams Douglas in author field, which you don't want.

In this case, one solution I can think of is doing a bulk metadata search and replace (do backup first the file metadata.db...) to remove the commas in the author field. Note that this will affect authors fields where there are commas placed correctly, for example in author_name_suffixes such as PhD, MD etc.

A related issue has been discussed recently here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=360805

Also, you may want to check what you have in the tweak setup described in this post:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...10&postcount=5

[chaley]

Originally Posted by Comfy.n

If I understand correctly, you have:

George, Orwell - author
Douglas, Adams - author

Orwell, George - author sort
Adams, Douglas - author sort

Quality check swapping tool would give you Orwell George and Adams Douglas in author field, which you don't want.

In this case, one solution I can think of is doing a bulk metadata search and replace (do backup first the file metadata.db...) to remove the commas in the author field. Note that this will affect authors fields where there are commas placed correctly, for example in author_name_suffixes such as PhD, MD etc.

A related issue has been discussed recently here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...d.php?t=360805

Also, you may want to check what you have in the tweak setup described in this post:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sh...10&postcount=5

Assuming your hypotheses are correct, another approach would be to in "Manage authors" use the "Copy all author sort values to author" then press OK. At that point the authors would all be LN, FN (if we are understanding the OP). If desired the OP can then use Quality Check to change all the authors to FN LN.

Finally, a scan through the lines in "Manage authors" would be a good idea to be sure that there aren't any undesired consequences of the name changes.

[Comfy.n]

Originally Posted by chaley

Assuming your hypotheses are correct, another approach would be to in "Manage authors" use the "Copy all author sort values to author" then press OK. At that point the authors would all be LN, FN (if we are understanding the OP). If desired the OP can then use Quality Check to change all the authors to FN LN.

Finally, a scan through the lines in "Manage authors" would be a good idea to be sure that there aren't any undesired consequences of the name changes.

Perfect.