How to automate removing items from artist field

Support
1

Hi,

I have a lot of jazz recordings and use online databases to fill out the artist field for recordings. Here is an example of a recording artist field:

Donald Byrd (tp) Hank Mobley (ts) Duke Pearson (p) Doug Watkins (b) Lex Humphries (d)

I would like an automated way to remove each of the instruments in parentheses since they don't really belong in the artist field. For example I would like to replace (tp) with a comma and any item in parentheses with a comma.

Is there any way to do this?

2

An action of the type: Replace with regular expression containing:
Field:
ARTIST
Regular expression:
\(.*?\)
Replace matches with:
,
Would do the trick. However that would replace ANYTHING in braces with a , which might be unwanted.

If you know exactly which instruments are possible, a more specific way would be to use a regex like this:

 \((?:tp|ts|p|b|d)\)

Which matches the instruments in braces and nothing else:

grafik
grafik217×149 1.85 KB

3

This worked nicely. However, is it possible to get the comma closer to the name. For example:

Donald Byrd , Pepper Adams , Herbie Hancock , Doug Watkins , Teddy Robinson

Notice that there is a space between the last letter of the name and the comma. I would prefer:

Donald Byrd, Pepper Adams, Herbie Hancock, Doug Watkins, Teddy Robinson

Is there a way I could do this?

4

Are you sure you haven't forgotten the LEADING space in the regular expression?
\(.*?\)
↑
It is necessary in both variants, also in
\((?:tp|ts|p|b|d)\)
↑

image
image217×149 2.09 KB

5

One additional question:

I have a new way of importing this same data and it shows in the following format in this same Artist field:

Mickey Roker\\Ray Bryant\\Sonny Rollins\\Walter Booker (should be two backslashes)

How can I automate replacing the \\ (two backslashes)) with a comma and space: ,

Note that I am using the double backslash only as a separator.

Thanks,

Bruce

6

Several things:

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and if you still have a new question, then please follow

esp. in this case the part about "Formatting".