Need Help!

A swapping-ground for Regular Expression syntax

Need Help!

Postby mnevruser1 » Thu Jan 26, 2017 6:54 pm

I will start off by saying I am not familiar with regular expression at all. That being said, I downloaded Bulk Rename Utility because I am working on a project where I am moving 2TB's of files from an external drive to a nas device and there are thousands of files that won't transfer due to a special character in the name. It seems to be the same two special characters for all of these files. What would be the regular expression to remove the special characters from all of these file names?
mnevruser1
 
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Re: Need Help!

Postby JMM » Thu Jan 26, 2017 7:24 pm

You don't need to use regular expressions for that. In Replace (3) enter the special character in Replace, and leave With empty. Select the folder containing all those files, and select subfolders in Filters (12). Select all files and hit Rename, that'll get rid of that special character. You can copy the special character by selecting one file with such character, press F2 to edit the name inline, and then select and copy the character to paste it to the Replace field.

Repeat the previous step for any special characters you want to get rid of, and remember you can put something in the With field in case you want to replace a special character with a normal character instead of just deleting.

If you can't paste or enter that special character somehow in the field, you can use regex, or the character translation feature which is very powerful. There's a how-to for character translations as a stick post in the BRU Support forum. If you still want to use regex, come here and someone (maybe me too) will surely help, but we'll need to know what are those special chars to be of any real help.
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