Quickly fix certain oddities in filenames and char translati

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Quickly fix certain oddities in filenames and char translati

Postby JMM » Sat Jan 25, 2014 1:28 pm

For those of us who can't get regex in our heads, certain common stuff is a bit hard to do.

I often work with a large number of files scattered in literally thousands of folders differently nested, and after some bulk renaming I have to do some manual cleaning such:
* Fix more than one consecutive space or similar character (e.g. an underscore repeated too many times).
* Fix files starting with spaces.
* Fix files ending with periods (Windows Explorer and many other utilities choke with these files badly)
* Fix names ending with a space before the extension.
* Fix funny characters with standard ASCII characters.
* Ensure ASCII compliance.

So I often don't remember the exact regular expression for files beginning with a space or ending with a period, and of these examples only the last one is easy to do with the replacer (module 3).

My suggestion is to add a new module with the following three options:
* Remove repeated chars: Upon entering a character e.g. the space, a sequence of any length of these characters gets replaced by the single character.
* Use the character translation table or not.
* Warn for characters outside the ASCII table.

For example I need certain files to not have accented characters in spanish, thus I need to replace á with a, then é with e, etc. but not all the times, so having to empty the character translation table when I don't need it and repopulating it again when I need it is a bit cumbersome. Ideally I would have the table populated all the times, and sometimes use it and other times not, but I don't see anywhere an option for this. Right now it's either use the table, or have it empty.

The last option is for finding oddities in filenames that might not be included in the character translation table. BRU wouldn't know what to do with these without instructing it with the translation table, so just a warn is enough. It would warn if the ASCII value of a certain char doesn't fall in the original 7-bit ASCII table. That means if the character is not between 32 (space) and 126 (the tilde) then it should be taken into account.

Right now I'm thinking that maybe the character translation table should have buttons for import/export (as simple text files), since sometimes what I want to fix is accented characters and other times I need to find and fix certain HTML escaped entities or similar, like ó or %20. But BRU doesn't even save the character translation table on exit. With this extra functionality, some character translation tables could be packed with BRU which could fix entities, escaped chars and other common stuff.

Thanks for your consideration and for bearing with me through this post ^_^

Regards, Juan.
JMM
 
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Joined: Sat Jan 25, 2014 12:12 pm

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