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[Three]

Is there one?

[blgentry]

You might want to give an example of what you want to do.  I don't know what you're asking.

Brian.

[Three]

My song titles include the date. For example, 9 de Julio - 1929. What I want to do is copy all of my song titles into another field, say Custom, but without the date, so for example I would like to have 9 de Julio in the Custom field. I would also be content to copy the entire song title into Custom and then do a search and replace eliminating the - 1929. Of course the problem is that I have 20,000 songs, and the dates range from 1900 to 2016.

Thanks

[blgentry]

You can use an expression to do that.  Are they all formatted like your example with exactly one dash and then a 4 digit date?

If so, a really naive expression would just chop off the last 7 characters (space, dash, space, 4 digits).

If you could give 3 or 4 examples, I could probably help you with an expression to remove the date from the title and put it into another field.

Brian.

[Three]

I want to keep the date in the title. But, I want a second field which has only the title without the date. And yes, they are all formatted the same way: a space, a dash, a space then four numbers. I know there is a language, kinda like the excel text manipulation language, (regular expressions) which allows for text manipulation, but can not figure out how to apply it in a search and replace setting. And yes, I was thinking that I globally search for the pattern, then chop the last collection of characters. And a search is required since perhaps 15-20% of the titles currently do not include the date.

Thanks

[blgentry]

The Expression Language is what lets you do things like this:

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Expression_Language

Regular Expressions, or regex, are one feature of the Expression Language.  Kind of a favorite of mine actually.  I just did a very limited experiment and wrote and expression that strips the ending date from the [Name] field.

To test this, make a new field, or an expression column.  Then paste in this expression:

Code: [Select]

=if(regex([Name],/#(.+)(\s*-\s*\d\d\d\d\s*)$#/),[R1],[Name])
That worked on my test cases.  I would expect it to work on your data too, unless there's something unusual I didn't account for.

Good luck,

Brian.