I'm trying to coordinate the way track names use abbreviations for "number" - #1, nr.1, No. 1, No.1, No 1, etc. In the end, I'd like everything to be in the format "No. 1"
I tried to set up a smartlist to show the non-conforming abbreviations of "number." But that turned out to be trickier than I expected for my level of search language skills (which doesn't currently include RegEx).
Here's the problematic subset of what I'm trying to do:
I want to capture all instances of "No #" and "No.#" and I don't want to capture any instances of "No. #" or words with "no" somewhere in them.
What I thought I could do is select all files with the whole word "No" in them, but without the string "No. " in them. (I know this is imperfect - it won't capture "Track No 1 and No. 2", for example, but bear with me for a minute.)
I put the following into my search expression: [name]=^No -[name]="No. "
The results didn't look right, so I opened the Smartlist rules again to make sure I didn't do anything obviously wrong. Here's what it showed: [name]="No" -[name]="No. "
The problem with this, of course, is that it captures track names that have the letter combination "no" anywhere in them ("Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen"). There are a lot of those that I'm trying to filter out.
I assumed I made some error in entering or saving the search expression, so I changed it back to: [name]=^No -[name]="No. "
I hit apply, nothing changed, and when I opened the Import/Export window again, it showed: [name]="No" -[name]="No. "
It is changing ^No to "No" on me behind the scenes.
I double checked the search language Wiki page:
^word Restricts matching to a full word. A word is broken by space, punctuation, etc.
Example: Match car as a full word, as in A Car for All, but not Barcarolle.
^car
Question 1: Am I doing something wrong?
Question 2: How can I use "search for a whole word" in a smartlist?
Question 3: Can I and should I be using RegEx for this?