Batch Renaming of Files in a Directory

Question

Is there an easy way to rename a group of files already contained in a directory, using Python?

Example: I have a directory full of *.doc files and I want to rename them in a consistent way.

X.doc -> "new(X).doc"

Y.doc -> "new(Y).doc"

Answer 1

Try: http://www.mattweber.org/2007/03/04/python-script-renamepy/

I like to have my music, movie, and picture files named a certain way. When I download files from the internet, they usually don’t follow my naming convention. I found myself manually renaming each file to fit my style. This got old realy fast, so I decided to write a program to do it for me.

This program can convert the filename to all lowercase, replace strings in the filename with whatever you want, and trim any number of characters from the front or back of the filename.

The program's source code is also available.

Answer 2

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).

Answer 3

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.