Normalize title case and restore chosen exceptions¶
Combine mechanical Mixed Case with a short, explicit exception policy.
This recipe keeps DJ and EP uppercase and lowercases interior and
and the when surrounded by spaces/tabs. It is a practice style, not an
English grammar engine or a recognizer of every artist's preferred spelling.
Inspect what the policy would do¶
Work on copied files with single-line title values. In the table, · marks
an ordinary space; do not type that visible marker literally.
| TITLE before | TITLE after the complete group |
|---|---|
THE DJ AND THE SEA (EP) |
The DJ and the Sea (EP) |
··DJ KOFI AND THE TIDEWATER BAND·· |
DJ Kofi and the Tidewater Band |
ADJACENT EPISODE |
Adjacent Episode |
THE END AND |
The End And |
AND THE TIDE |
And the Tide |
iOS AT THE HARBOUR |
Ios At the Harbour |
AC/DC LIVE |
Ac/dc Live |
The last two show why review is essential. If iOS or AC/DC must keep
that spelling, exclude those files or add a separately tested exception.
This group's two acronym rules do not protect every brand or proper name.
Repair a confirmed encoding error before capitalization: changing the case
of garbled surrogate characters can destroy clues to their original bytes.
See mojibake repair. Do not put unrelated artist names,
identifiers or URLs through this title policy with _TAG or _ALL.
Build the ordered action group¶
- Save or discard pending edits and select one copied practice file.
- Open Actions → Actions…, create
Practice title case exceptions, and open Edit actions…. - Add the rows below. For every regex row, set Case-sensitive comparison
to Off. For Mixed Case, Words begin after is the literal set
(-_. - Keep each action and the group, then Save groups.
- Check only this group and choose Apply checked groups. Compare the saved title and any operation errors before trying the remaining copies.
| Step | Action | Field | Pattern or case | Replacement or word separators |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Replace with Regular Expression | TITLE |
\A[ \t]+ |
Leave empty |
| 2 | Replace with Regular Expression | TITLE |
[ \t]+\z |
Leave empty |
| 3 | Case Conversion | TITLE |
Mixed Case | (-_ |
| 4 | Replace with Regular Expression | TITLE |
\bDj\b |
DJ |
| 5 | Replace with Regular Expression | TITLE |
\bEp\b |
EP |
| 6 | Replace with Regular Expression | TITLE |
([ \t])And(?=[ \t]) |
$1and |
| 7 | Replace with Regular Expression | TITLE |
([ \t])The(?=[ \t]) |
$1the |
In the action boxes, patterns and replacements are entered directly, without format-string quotes. The two trim rows leave no unwanted edge spacing. They matter because the interior-word rules use surrounding whitespace to distinguish the first and last words from interior ones.
Why this order works¶
Mixed Case lowercases the rest of each word and starts words after whitespace
or a configured character. (-_ adds an opening parenthesis, hyphen and
underscore as word starts. It is a character set, not a regex or an exception
list. The first practice title becomes The Dj And The Sea (Ep) at this stage.
The following acronym rules restore exact whole words. \b prevents the
Ep rule from changing the beginning of Episode, or the Dj rule from
changing letters inside Adjacent.
For a small word, ([ \t]) captures its preceding space/tab. The lookahead
(?=[ \t]) requires following whitespace without consuming it. $1and
or $1the puts the leading whitespace back with the chosen lowercase word.
First words have no leading whitespace after trimming, and last words have
no following whitespace, so those words keep their capitals.
Putting Mixed Case after the exception rows would turn DJ back into Dj
and EP back into Ep. A rule that depends on a previous result belongs
after the action that creates that result.
Add exceptions carefully¶
An acronym list is an editorial choice. Restore III, a specific place
name or an unusual artist spelling only when that rule fits the selected
material. Match whole words or an intentionally narrower context, not an
unreviewed substring everywhere.
Words touching punctuation are not all handled by the whitespace-only small word rules. The group does not parse sentence structure or guarantee a house style for quotations and parentheses. Inspect those cases and keep them for manual editing when a general rule would alter meaning.
Every current value of TITLE is processed independently. A file with several
title values retains a list rather than being reduced through a bare
%title% placeholder. This does not override native format/value restrictions.
Check writes and recovery¶
There is no full group dry-run in this recipe. The group writes when applied; Save groups only stores it. Use one copy, compare expected results, then expand the selection. An action warning does not stop later actions/groups, so inspect the full reported result before repeating the workflow.
Use Edit → Undo … for the recorded operation during the current desktop session, and keep original files for recovery beyond it. A capitalization rule cannot reliably reconstruct spelling that an earlier cleanup discarded.