Regex to sort files into folders alphabetically by surname?

Question

I 'm trying to find a way to write a regex to sort files into separate folders alphabetically based on surname. The file names all start with a name but written "first name last name" so I need an expression that will match the first letter of the last word before the first deliminator " - ". For example

 John M. Allen - job 00 - october.txt

Should match the "A" in Allen and all the other last names beginning with "A" so I can use File Renamer to then move them to a folder called "A"

I'm fairly new to regex and dont know how to go about this one. I'm using File Renamer 6.0.1 which is in JS.

Answer 1

Try this:

\b[A-Z](?=[a-z]+\s-\s)

See this.

This may look at bit complex, but it's not if you understand all the pieces (the \\b means match a word boundary, just google 'word boundaries regex' to learn more). The ?= is a look-ahead assertion. I've added a word boundary and some more details in order to avoid bad matches, suppose you had A before the 00 - october part, if I didn't use [az]+ and instead \\w+ then that would match as well which is not what you want.

Answer 2

Not particularly robust, given that it won't work for two last names or any funky punctuation, but this should should get you started anyway:

(\w)\w+(?<=\w) - 

Example

The first letter of the last name is in the first capture group; depending on what language you're using you'll need to sort out how to reference it.