Request for improved regex support for exact artist name matching in Everything 1.5

[Debugger]

Request for improved regex support for exact artist name matching in Everything 1.5

Hello Everything Support Team,

I am a heavy user of Everything 1.5 and often search for music files with artist names that include mixed Chinese and English characters

Currently, I find it difficult to perform exact matches for artist names without also matching other similar or combined artist names

Since Everything’s regex support lacks lookahead and lookbehind features, I am unable to filter precisely and avoid false positives.

Could you please advise:

Is there a recommended way to write regex patterns in Everything 1.5 to exactly match specific artist names in filenames, ignoring other concatenated or extended artist names?

Are there plans to enhance regex support (such as lookarounds) or add filtering options to help with exact matching of Unicode and mixed-language artist names?

In many filenames, the remixing artists are listed inside parentheses and sometimes there are multiple name/nick remixers combined with symbols like “&” or [b]“Vs”[/b] etc..

(....&.... )
I want to search specifically for files where only one remixer’s name appears inside the parentheses, without any collaborators or additional artists.

Thank you for your help and for developing this great tool!

[therube]

Examples of specific names & associated not wanted similar/combined (artist) names?

[Debugger]

^(?=.*\bARTIST NAME\b)(?!.*[&]|.*\bVs\b).+$

[void]

Everything uses PCRE 3.38 and has full support for lookahead and lookbehind.

Please try:

\((?![^)]*(?:&|\bvs\b))([^)]*)\)

ARTIST NAME is captured if needed.



This is easier to do with Everything syntax:

regex:\(([^)]*)\) !regmatch1:& !ww:regmatch1:vs

regex:\(([^)]*)\) == match ( ... ) and capture the matched text in regmatch1.
!regmatch1:& == exclude & in regmatch1.
!ww:regmatch1:vs == exclude whole word Vs in regmatch1.

[Debugger]

Regex matches too many results


Message:

Hello,


I am using the regex:


(?<!\w)XXXX(?!\w)


I expected it to match only files where "XXX" is a standalone artist name, not part of a longer string with &, vs, or other artists.


However, it also matches:


(YYYY&XXXX Remix V2 DJP)

(ZZZZ&XXXX Electro Mix)

(VVVV&XXXX Electro Mix 2K23)

[void]

Please try:

Code: Select all

regex:\((?![^)]*(?:&|\bvs\b))[^)]*\bXXXX\b[^)]*\)

Easier Everything syntax:

Code: Select all

regex:\(([^)]*)\) !regmatch1:& !ww:regmatch1:vs ww:regmatch1:XXXX

[Debugger]

The problem is that the names in parentheses are “dirty,” i.e., they contain additional words and characters, and sometimes regex does not work perfectly because it does not cover different variants of song names.
I wanted to share some feedback regarding handling Chinese and non-Unicode mixed song titles. These can be more complicated than typical European titles due to the mixture of character sets, spacing, and punctuation. As a result, many regex patterns that work well on European titles often produce incorrect matches or fail to capture all variations with these mixed titles.