RegEX: match ([^A-Z]*) but stop if you find "foo"

Question

I ran into a problem that I can't figure out how to fix. I have a series of video files with names like this:

FooBar-tooGGG1 - s01e01 - (HW) - SomeText.mp4

So I have to make sure that spaces are added before capital letters BUT ONLY until "- s01e" appears (thus ignoring the rest of the text):

Foo Bar-too GGG 1 - s01e01 - (HW) - SomeText.mp4

Looking around I stumbled upon these RegEX:

(?-i)([A-Z]{1})([^A-Z]*)

Replace with: $1$2

.+?(?=abc)

or

\w*(?<!foo)bar

or

^(?:(?!foo).)*

and this played a little bit on Regex101 but I can't end up getting only two types of results:

(?-i)([A-Z]{1})([^A-Z]*.+?(?= - s01e))

or

(?-i)([A-Z]{1})([^A-Z]*)/g

Respectively:

F ooBar-tooGGG1 - s01e01 - (HW) - SomeText.mp4

and

Foo Bar-too GGG1 - s01e01 - ( H W) -  Some Text.mp4

I'm not very good at RegEx but I've been trying everything since this morning, put in the middle, use +? instead of * o. * etc.

RegEX Engine: PCRE2; PCRE. If bulk rename doesn't fit as software, I also have: FlexibleRenamer and RegexRenamer (also for Windows)

On RegEx Renamer (windows) it works . On bulk Rename the `$1 $2` works if you enable V2 (which in theory uses PCRE2), despite this, `$1 $2` in Replace and `([a-z])([A-Z])(?=.*\ss\d{1,2}e\d)/g` as RegEX on Bulk Rename with v2 work — Geass, May 06 '21 at 12:36

Wiktor Stribiżew · Accepted Answer · 2021-05-06T12:40:57.393

In Bulk Rename Utility, you can use

(?<=[a-z])(?=[A-Z])(?=.*\s[sS]\d{1,2}[eE]\d)/g

Set the replacement to a space. Make sure the v2 check box is set.

You may also use Powershell (CTRL+Esc, start typing Powershell and press ENTER):

cd 'FILES_FOLDER_PATH_HERE'
$files = Get-ChildItem -Filter '*.mp4'
$files | Rename-Item  -NewName {$_.name -creplace '(?<=\p{Ll})(?=\p{Lu})(?=.*\s[sS]\d{1,2}[eE]\d)',' ' }

Here is the regex demo.

Details

cd 'FILES_FOLDER_PATH_HERE' - moving to the folder with your files
$files = Get-ChildItem -Filter '*.mp4' - getting all files in that folder with the mp4 extension
$files | Rename-Item -NewName {$_.name -creplace '(?<=\p{Ll})(?=\p{Lu})(?=.*\s[sS]\d{1,2}[eE]\d)',' ' } renames the files using a case sensitive (due to -creplace) regex search and replace.

The regex matches

(?<=\p{Ll}) - a location immediately preceded with a lowercase letter (\p{Ll} is a Unicode variant of [a-z])
(?=\p{Lu}) - a location immediately followed with an uppercase letter (\p{Lu} is a Unicode variant of [A-Z])
(?=.*\s[sS]\d{1,2}[eE]\d) - a location immediately followed with
- .* - any text (other than newlines)
- \s - a whitespace
- [sS] - s or S
- \d{1,2} - one or two digits
- [eE] - e or E
- \d - a digit.

RegEX: match ([^A-Z]*) but stop if you find "foo"

1 Answers1