Regex on Janusworx

What I Learned Today (9th of February, 2023)

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Thu, 09 Feb 2023 19:22:28 +0530

Regex
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Started doing regex exercises, so i don’t get bored doing only python. will alternate them for now
Using Practice Makes Regexp. I have only the book though. It’s now expanded to include video solutions too. Highly recommend any of Reuven’s courses
Set up environment and did one exercise which was to look up the user’s input in a dictionary (a word dictionary. not a programming dictionary)

Linux Mint
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Yesterday’s work was for naught

Devops
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Kubernetes, began doing some exercises
Set up the environment today
Spoke with a friend about practicing Ansible / Devops stuff
Learnt about putting in environment variables into a docker compose file and then using them in a Django container

Hugo
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Diddled with the code element font size on the blog, to make it look a little larger

Urdu
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Learnt about the “tashdiid” symbol that helps add emphasis to a consonant

Physical Fitness
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Nearing the end of my month long journey.
Have gotten over the pain hump, but the personal trainer isn’t quite sympatico with my needs. He’s a good egg, but we seem to be talking past each other. Wonder what to do when my time is up mid week next.
Did legs today. Went well. Jogged 10m after. Walked 30m after that.

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Using Regex to Prepend to Titles in Calibre

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Sat, 20 Nov 2021 12:04:27 +0530

So I do this peculiar thing, where I prepend the author’s initials to the title of every book I add to Calibre.¹ ²

And all these years, I’ve just been manually editing the metadata, everytime I added a book, and changing the titles to what I want.
It’s not a problem if it’s just one book, but I normally tend to go hogwild with authors, normally buying out / downloading all their work.
And now that I’ve learnt the basics of the hammer called regex, I wanted to see, you guessed it, if there was a way to quickly do this using regular expressions in Caliber, which has inbuilt support for regexes.

A quick look through the documentation led me to the search and replace page, which explains really pretty well … well, how search and replace works :)

So what did I need to do?
I needed to take the initial character of the title of any book.
And then replace it with author initials + that character

So here’s the Calibre search and replace box when I choose to edit the metadata for multiple books.
I choose Regular expression as my MO and I choose the title field to work with.
You can see the titles of the books, I chose below³

Then, in the “Search for:” box, I go looking for a single character at the beginning of the title.
With regex I express that as a ^.
I’ve surrounded that pattern with () brackets to tell regex to remember what it matched.
You’ll see that I’ve matched the character succcesfully and the “A” from A Journey … and the “T” from Twenty Thousand … are missing in the Test results in the bottom right.

Now in the “Replace with:” box, I tell the regex engine what to match it with.
Which in my case are the author initials “JV” followed by a “ - ” seperator followed by a \1 which tells it to put the match that I found earlier back in.
You can see, now that the titles match the crazy way, I want them.

We do an ok, and Tada!
The books are renamed in the library :)

All hail the power of regex!

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Why? ↩︎
Calibre is a rock solid, does not get in your way, marvellously multifunctional way of categorising ebooks and comics. And that is just scratching the tip of everything Calibre can do ↩︎
Click the images for a larger version ↩︎

Regular Expressions (Regex) Resources

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 07:04:51 +0530

Will update this page whenever I come across something regex, that I love.

Damian Conway’s 5 hour, Understanding Regular Expressions series. This one is the bestestest regex resource ever. If you know the basics of programming and then want to pick up Regular Expressions, this is it.¹
And Damian is one of the finest, bestestestest teachers around.

Damian Conway’s hour long youtube talk and the accompanying slides
RegexTip, one of John D Cook’s many twitter accounts. This one specialises in, you guessed it, regex tips
Regex cheatsheets? This one, by Damian Conway and this one by Dave Child.
Want to keep regex top of mind? Use Anki? This is the deck I love
Unnecessary, ars gratia artis like Deep Dive? The Friedl book is it.

Also don’t be like me and try to learn Regex first. You’re just making it harder on yourself. It is indeed possible, but nearly every regex resource presumes basic programming knowledge. It does not have to be much. Loops and variables and such, Automate the Boring Stuff is good for that, but I don’t want to digress into Python resources 😂 ↩︎

Multiline Regex Search in VS Code

feedback@janusworx.com (Mario Jason Braganza) — Mon, 16 Aug 2021 15:18:10 +0530

This is a picture of my notes, when I import them in from the Kindle.
And every time I have to corral them into some sort of structure or write a blog post, I needed to laboriously get rid of all the Kindle metadata with multiple searches (and replaces.)

I mean these lines

==========
Draft No. 4 (John McPhee)
- Your Highlight on page 27 | location 406-407 | Added on Sunday, 15 August 2021 12:43:15

But having learnt Regex about a year ago, I have been using it on and off and have come to appreciate the power it offers.
And I’ve been increasingly trying to solve all of my text search issues using regex, everywhere.¹

With a recent book, I managed to use regex to get rid of single lines all at once.
It still took me 3 sets of search and replaces though.
So today, I got lazier and curiouser and wondered if I could do all three lines together.
I was trying combinations of /g and /gs to somehow get the regex engine to span lines, but no dice.
A bit of web surfing led me to this post which told me that, all I needed to do was match newline literals \n
This led, to me tinkering and coming up with this search regex
==========[\n\s]D.*[\n\s]-.*
Which led to …

matching everything in one fell swoop!
All hail the power of regex!

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(emphasis on trying. I’m no regex genius) ↩︎

Regex on Janusworx

What I Learned Today (9th of February, 2023)

Regex #

Linux Mint #

Devops #

Hugo #

Urdu #

Physical Fitness #