Use Search Regex to delete part of a URL, in WordPress

Problem: You need a working regex to delete an /unwanted section/ of a URL, on a self-hosted installation of WordPress. The /unwanted section/ is different in each URL, and you have hundreds or even thousands of such URLs to deal with.

Solution: If your /unwanted section/ string has a repeating section of the URL in front of it, then you’re in luck. The popular free WordPress plugin ‘Search Regex’ and this small regex, will do it. The regex is seen here working as expected in the RegularExpressions101 sandbox…

What it’s doing: The desired repeating URLpart2 in the URL path is being found and marked, along with its following / slash. This and whatever follows the found section is also marked for deletion, even if what follows is different in every URL. The ‘marking for deletion’ stops at the next / in the URL.

In WordPress: Here’s how it’s applied in Search Regex in WordPress. Because this example is also deleting the repeating URLpart2/, that gets added back via the “Replace” box.

Warnings: Always preview first, using “Search”. Only if you are absolutely happy with how the URL now looks in the previews, should you then press “Replace All”. Always make a backup of the WordPress install before attempting such changes.

Archive.org can now do inter-library loans, free

The Internet Archive is now… “quickly fulfilling Interlibrary Loan (ILL) requests” for articles, at no charge. This appears to be a service for libraries only, not for regular users. And even then Archive.org is currently only accepting requests… “from libraries that use WorldShare ILL, Tipasa, and ILLiad”.

Zenodo and IA Scholar

The Internet Archive’s Scholar service is being filled with junk on junk domains, via Zenodo…

It’s been like this for months now, and there’s no way to say “No Zenodo” in results. Apparently at Zenodo…

We are currently in the process of moving Zenodo on top of our next-generation platform … together with 25 other partners. (Dec 2022)

… so it would be a pity if the larger new project found itself inadvertently ingesting all this DOI-assigned piffle from the old service. The PDFs are randomly-assembled jumbled-up fragments of serious-sounding texts and TOCs.

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Update: Two weeks later, still not fixed…

‘Party like it’s 1964…’

The New York Public Library (NYPL) and a data partner are combing through copyright registration and copyright renewal records, which in the U.S. are on a zillion scanned card-index files with tricky column-formatting and no OCR. The NYPL’s “early findings” currently estimate that, prior to 1964 in the U.S., only…

25 to 35 percent of books were renewed, while the rest were not.

Sounds good, if it leads to the legal liberation of around 65% of old U.S. books, for re-use and re-purposing. The NYPL’s project started with a 10,000-card pilot programme and XML output…

NYPL partnered with the technology firm Data Conversion Laboratory (DCL) [who] started by adding OCR to all the digital copyright registration files, then using algorithms to automatically structure and sort the data.

NYPL plans to make their XML open source for other libraries

And I’d imagine that many members of the public and non-university scholars would also find uses for it.

GitHub code search (beta)

GitHub code search, currently in beta with a sign-up required.

The technology behind its speed (regular keyword search doesn’t scale well for code search) is explained in a new blog post.