Batch Renaming of Files in a Directory
I prefer writing small one liners for each replace I have to do instead of making a more generic and complex code. E.g.:
This replaces all underscores with hyphens in any non-hidden file in the current directory
import os
[os.rename(f, f.replace('_', '-')) for f in os.listdir('.') if not f.startswith('.')]
Such renaming is quite easy, for example with os and glob modules:
import glob, os
def rename(dir, pattern, titlePattern):
for pathAndFilename in glob.iglob(os.path.join(dir, pattern)):
title, ext = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(pathAndFilename))
os.rename(pathAndFilename,
os.path.join(dir, titlePattern % title + ext))
You could then use it in your example like this:
rename(r'c:\temp\xx', r'*.doc', r'new(%s)')
The above example will convert all *.doc
files in c:\temp\xx
dir to new(%s).doc
, where %s
is the previous base name of the file (without extension).
If you don't mind using regular expressions, then this function would give you much power in renaming files:
import re, glob, os
def renamer(files, pattern, replacement):
for pathname in glob.glob(files):
basename= os.path.basename(pathname)
new_filename= re.sub(pattern, replacement, basename)
if new_filename != basename:
os.rename(
pathname,
os.path.join(os.path.dirname(pathname), new_filename))
So in your example, you could do (assuming it's the current directory where the files are):
renamer("*.doc", r"^(.*)\.doc$", r"new(\1).doc")
but you could also roll back to the initial filenames:
renamer("*.doc", r"^new\((.*)\)\.doc", r"\1.doc")
and more.