How do I regexp-match (remove) an arbitrary series of two-letter language codes separated by commas, to the right of a title?

Question

I have a bunch of strings such as:

Super Mario Bros. 8 (En,Fr,De,Es,It)
Donald Duck in Whacky Land (En,Fr,De,Es,Sv)
Toadstool Adventures 3D (En)
Chinaland (En,De)
A title which doesn't have any such thing
...

That is, a title of a product followed by (sometimes) a list of one or more language codes in parentheses.

I really struggle to come up with a (PCRE) regexp to safely remove these from the strings in a safe manner. That is, not likely to touch the titles.

I know that ([A-Z]{1}[a-z]{1}) must be involved somewhere, to match a single language code such as "It" or "De", but how I should handle the possibility of any number of such in a row, with commas between or no comma (if it's just one), is beyond my regular expression skills.

I really wish that they had used some kind of unambiguous separator between the title part and the "metadata" part of the filenames... Then I wouldn't need to do all this manual trial-and-error removal. But they didn't.

why not just remove `(anything inside the parentheses)`? – missuse Nov 30 '20 at 19:25 — missuse, Nov 30 '20 at 19:25
@missuse Because titles can have parentheses. – user379490 Nov 30 '20 at 19:27 — user379490, Nov 30 '20 at 19:27

MonkeyZeus · Answer 1 · 2020-11-30T19:39:10.657

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Something like this would do it:

\([A-Z][a-z](?:,[A-Z][a-z])*\)$

https://regex101.com/r/xxNQ8h/1

edited Nov 30 '20 at 19:39

answered Nov 30 '20 at 19:29

MonkeyZeus

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wp78de · Answer 2 · 2020-11-30T19:44:07.033

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Try it like this:

\(([A-Z][a-z],?)+\).*$

Online Demo

edited Nov 30 '20 at 19:44

answered Nov 30 '20 at 19:33

wp78de

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Albeit unlikely, this would capture wrong stuff like `(GoTo)` – MonkeyZeus Nov 30 '20 at 19:35

How do I regexp-match (remove) an arbitrary series of two-letter language codes separated by commas, to the right of a title?

2 Answers2