[FAQ] What is the best action to take when the file scanner gets it wrong?

[deazo]

  OK thanks for your answers Rick and Buah.
  I guess the only way is the long way...
 
  But just to clarify, and because the results I get are the same with or without Regex's listed, can I assume the program is not using these expressions?
 
  Also, is there not a Regex expression that would try to match ONLY full matching of titles?
  A Regex that would basically not look for an expression within another one, and would only catch the full file name.

  Just for info, I usually add movies by batch of 20-30, so the scan can be a timesaver.
  Unfortunately I also spend a lot of time "ignoring", unticking, changing to "add new movie" (by the way, when you do that, all your previous unticking disappears... frustrating), etc...
  Also my storage drive being on my network, navigating to that path for each movie is very long indeed.

[buah]

Did you check "Smart detecting" checkboxes in File scanner preferences?

[deazo]

 Yes I did.

[buah]

Did you, by any chance, try what I proposed to you on previous page: to reproduce my case?

[rick.ca]

But just to clarify, and because the results I get are the same with or without Regex's listed, can I assume the program is not using these expressions?

No. See my previous message.

Also, is there not a Regex expression that would try to match ONLY full matching of titles?

No. The regex extract the <title>, <year>, etc. from the file path. They have nothing to do with finding a match in the database. The program does that.

As I said, I think the solution would be for all matches to be presented in the results window. An exact match could be listed first, and pre-selected (and any partial matches not be selected). I suppose it would also make sense to provide an option to restrict the results to exact matches.

In the meantime, I suggest you name new movies in the form [Title] ([Year]).ext, and use an appropriate regex to extract <title> and <year> ((?i)^.*\\(?P<title>) (?P<year>(19|2\d)\d{2}).*\..{3,4} should work). That will greatly improve the likelihood of exact matches, as well as resolve most ambiguities in the filenames themselves (i.e., for remakes, or movies that coincidentally have the same title). If you still have problems because existing files which are already matched are being improperly matched to other titles, you may have to rename all your existing files. You probably already have an Excel worksheet from which you can create a batch file to do this.

[deazo]

 Yes Buah I tried your Avatar example, it suggested to change the file path for the existing Avatar entry. This is not really surprising as no other entry has "avatar" in their title.

 Rick, I never realized that (year) could make a difference... I will try to rename all files and add (year) in their titles. Hopefully it won't mess too many things.

 One question though: I see "find and replace" on the scan preferences window, what does it do exactly? Can it rename filenames?

 Thanks.

[buah]

One question though: I see "find and replace" on the scan preferences window, what does it do exactly?

I use it to replace special characters in the file and folder name. For instance:

Is There Anybody There^.avi is recognized by regex as Is Anybody There? which is proper title of the movie. Previously I set up scanner to find "^" and replace it with "?"

Also I set up these replacements:

-- -> :
~ -> "

I haven't found yet movies with special characters: *, >, <, /, \, and I have chosen ^, ~, {, }, ` (not ') for file names because of the same reason.