Pattern in Rename not working for expressions?

Help & Support
1

Hello

It seems to me that expressions doesn't work in PATTERN parameter for Rename FINDREP.

This does nothing:
Rename PATTERN="[-_.]" TO=" " FINDREP

2

They're not meant to. Find & Replace does a straight text search/replace - if you want to use regular expressions, use regular expressions mode.

3

But, correct me if I am wrong, in regexp mode there is no way to make multiple replacements in this way (equivalent to s/._-/ /g in perl)?

4

You can make a regex replacement repeat by adding # to the end of the pattern (or repeat a specific number of times, e.g. #3 to repeat three times). Anything more complex and you'll need to use VBScript.

5

@Xyzzy
I don't understand all of the Perl syntax, I'm more familiar with PHP.

Does this DOpus code help ?

@nodeselect Rename REGEXP PATTERN="(.*)([-_\.])(.*\..*)#" TO="\1 \3" type=files Rename REGEXP PATTERN="(.*)([-_\.])(.*)#" TO="\1 \3" type=dirs
To eliminate multiple space characters, modify the above code to this.

@nodeselect Rename REGEXP PATTERN="(.*)([-_\.]| )(.*\..*)#" TO="\1 \3" type=files Rename REGEXP PATTERN="(.*)([-_\.]| )(.*)#" TO="\1 \3" type=dirs
These codes may not be the best answer, but I think they may do what you are thinking.

6

To my surprise it works, but that also means that in DO regexps work like perl swap, not like match. This has an advantage in my situation, but is a problem when you want the standard behaviour.
Let's take filename 12341.txt
This

Rename REGEXP FROM="*.txt" PATTERN="(.*)1(.*)#" TO="\1\2"

removes all 1s, while it should remove just THE LAST! :question:
So, how to remove just the last one, assuming that there are unknown numbers of 1s before it?

7

Oh, I think I am starting to understand. The '#' triggers multiple matching behaviour, effectively changing 'match' into 'swap'.
This is what actually jon stated and manual writes, but I've interpreted it as regex's {} operator (repetitions).

In a knee-jerk reaction I've interpreted DO regexs like the perl ones. While there is no difference in simple uses, there are in more advanced ones.

8

This should remove the last 1:

Rename REGEXP FROM="*.txt" PATTERN="(.*)1([^1]*)" TO="\1\2"

(Untested.)