Question

I’m using a software to edit songs using regular expressions. This is what I have:

Jimmy Eat World – The Middle (.mp3)

What I would like to do is delete the space before the “-” and everything after, so I would just be left with “Jimmy Eat World”

And the other action that I would like to perform is to delete everything up to the “-” and the space following so I’d be left with just “The Middle”

Answer 1

That’s an easy one.

First action – Remove anything after the dash:

• Replace / -.*/ with the empty string. (Note there’s an actual space before the dash.)
• If there could be multiple spaces before the dash, you can use this variant: / +-.*/ (again with an actual space before the +).

Second action – Remove anything up to the dash:

• Replace /.* - / with the empty string. (Note there’s an actual space after the dash.)

Notes

• The slashes / above are not part of the regex, you won’t have to type them. They serve as a visual delimiter here.
• The . means “any character” (except newlines, which you won’t have anyway in filenames)
• The * means “the previous item, zero to any number of times”
• The + means “the previous item, at least once, possibly any number of times”
• Most other characters in regular expressions mean what they say, so a space in the regex will match a space in your string. Notable exceptions are ^, $, ., +, *, ?, {, }, (, ), [, ], | and \, which have their own special meaning but are of no deeper concern in your situation.