Helping importing books using regular expression

[askyn]

Hi all /wave,

sorry to bother but I need some help setting up a expression to import a large group of books.

Using the file name as the data.

Here is the format:

AAA-#### blah blah blah.???

AAA = series, could be 2 or 3 letters
#### = series number, could be 1-4 numbers
blah blah blah = title of the book
??? = file extension ... dont care about

between aaa and #### is a dash
there is a space after ####

Could some kind soul please help me with a expression I could use when adding books for the above?

Thank you

PS - not sure it matters, once in a blue moon there wont be a series / series number. I can adjust those manually tho as there are only a couple

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by askyn

Could some kind soul please help me with a expression I could use when adding books for the above?

Would you post 3 or 4 examples, just to make sure we've got the spaces and hyphens correct? It's easier to work with real filenames that can actually be tested, rather than a description of the filename format.

[askyn]

sure =)

random made up stuff, but has same format (note dont really care about authors name but what the heck will add in from examples i have ):

AB-321 A dog's life-sleeping all day.txt
SDF-102 Trees, the ultimate air cleaner (Ibe Breathing).rtf
BB-1253 Catfish revival - how fish fed a nation (Hookd Mah Hat).doc
CCS-3421 The world of Fluffer Numphs (Henry Elephant).txt

( just to be sure, ROFL, no I dont have books labled that ( altho the catfish one sounds fun )
(Yes, authors are always in the brackets)
(yes, series / series number are as displayed)

Hope that helps

[Starson17]

Originally Posted by askyn

random made up stuff, but has same format (note dont really care about authors name

If you don't care about authors, try this:

(?P<series>[^\- ]+)-(?P<series_index>\d+) (?P<title>[^\(\)]*)

It's easy to write one that picks up authors, but when I did it, and you had no author, it defaulted to the entire filename as title.

[askyn]

Thank you much =)

that worked fantastic.

HEHE have NO idea why it works, but it works fantastically.