# help with regex to remove parts of the title
**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-regex-to-remove-parts-of-the-title/12879
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [December 30, 2011, 7:12am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-regex-to-remove-parts-of-the-title/12879 "2011-12-30T07:12:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 4
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@666JTK666](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/666JTK666)
#### Post date: [December 30, 2011, 7:12am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-regex-to-remove-parts-of-the-title/12879/1 "2011-12-30T07:12:13Z")
hi folks I would apreciate a little help.
ok i have a bunch of mp3's whith the title tag like this.
001 - nameofsong - album example 001 - bozo - bozo's greatest hits
I want to get rid of the track# and the album thus my title would be only bozo
I have poked around a bit and found this
^\s\*[0-9]+\s\*-\s\*
and it seems to work good at removing the track number.
But I am at a loss on how to remove everything from the end of the songname forwards.
big ty for your help.
---
### Author:  [@stevehero](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/stevehero)
#### Post date: [December 31, 2011, 3:45pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-regex-to-remove-parts-of-the-title/12879/2 "2011-12-31T15:45:51Z")
> [@666JTK666](#):
>
> 001 - nameofsong - album example 001 - bozo - bozo's greatest hits
>
> I want to get rid of the track# and the album thus my title would be only bozo.
use.
reg exp: \[1\]\s+-\s+[^-]\s+-\s+[^-]\s+-\s+([^-])\s+-\s+[^-]$
replace with: $1
^ anchors search to beginning of text string.
[^-] finds everything which is NOT a '-'.
\s+ \s finds whitespace and + is a limiter which finds an unlimited amount of whitespaces.
- finds the '-' character.
It carrys on the pattern with 5 [^-] and 4 \s+-\s+ like the pattern you have.
$ anchors search at end of text string.
_EDIT_
notice the surrounding brackets ([^-]) on the 4th [^-] in the reg exp.
The function for this it to capture the text string contained inside that. That is why the return is $1.
If you had another capture in the reg exp the value for that would be $2 and so on. BTW captures work from left to right.
Hope this helps.
* * *
1. ^-
---
### Author:  [@DetlevD](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/DetlevD)
#### Post date: [December 31, 2011, 6:29pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-regex-to-remove-parts-of-the-title/12879/3 "2011-12-31T18:29:04Z")
> [@666JTK666](#):
>
> ... mp3's whith the title tag like this.
> 001 - nameofsong - album example 001 - bozo - bozo's greatest hits
> I want to get rid of the track# and the album thus my title would be only bozo ...
You are in luck, the TITLE tag-field's content is a 'well formed' string, which can be easily divided into single items, because of the embedded space-hyphen-space character sequence separators.
When using the Regular Expression language, a possible solution looks like this ...
$regexp(%TITLE%,'^(.+?) - (.+?) - (.+?) - (.+?) - (.+?)$','$4')
... will return the fourth item.
$regexp(%TITLE%,'^(.+?) - (.+?) - (.+?) - (.+?) - (.+?)$','$4 - $5')
... will return the fourth and fifth item, separated by a space-hyphen-space character sequence.
As an alternative you can use ...
Action: "Guess values"
Source format: %TITLE%
Guessing pattern: %DUMMY% - %DUMMY% - %DUMMY% - %TITLE% - %DUMMY%
... will save the fourth item into the tag-field TITLE.
Guessing pattern: %DUMMY% - %DUMMY% - %DUMMY% - %TITLE%
... will save the fourth and fifth item into the tag-field TITLE.
Guessing pattern: %DUMMY% - %TITLE% - %DUMMY%
... will save the second item into the tag-field TITLE.
DD.20111231.2030.CET
---
### Author:  [@system](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/system)
#### Post date: [February 9, 2026, 12:23pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/help-with-regex-to-remove-parts-of-the-title/12879/4 "2026-02-09T12:23:33Z")