Removing Non English Characters From Titles

Help & Support
1

I have 500,000 files that need to be checked and have any and all non english characters removed from the file name.

Is there a fast way to accomplaish this at all?

Thanks

Mark
New Zealand

2

By non-English characters, do you mean all but the typical ASCII characters such as A-Z (upper and lowercase), 0-9, and punctuation? If so, try these rename settings:

Old Name: (.)([^\x20-\x7e])(.)#
New Name: \1\3
Type: Regular Expression

3

Thanks, that seems to have worked on the file names.

However, it hasnt seemed to caught folder names that are non english. What needs to be changed to catch those as well?

Thanks again.

Mark
NZ

4

MrC's suggestion should work the same on files and folders.

It probably won't filter out Unicode characters, though. (Unless I'm confused about what it's doing, it's filtering out characters in the 0x20 to 0x7e range, but lots of non-English characters are way above that range in Unicode.)

If the problem is the characters themselves and not whether they are in a file or a folder name, try the alternative. Various simple rename presets, #5: Make Safe Name.

5

[quote="leo"]MrC's suggestion should work the same on files and folders.
... it's filtering out characters in the 0x20 to 0x7e range...
[/quote]

It is filtering out all characters not in the ASCII range space to tilde (~).

I think the OP wants to select the root of a folder tree, and have the replace work on both files and folders all the way down the path. With DOpus' "Rename files in selected sub-folders" mode, only file names get changed. With it disabled, only the currently selected folder's items will be renamed.

I don't know how DOpus handles the subsequent files when renaming a selected list of files and both folder and file names are changed.

@leo - is this safe to do?

6

Ah, my mistake, sorry. I got confused by the regexp. Both are fairly similar in that case.

You should be able to get what's needed by going into Flat View -> Mixed mode, selecting everything, then running the Rename tool on that (leaving Rename files in selected sub-folders off so the folders themselves are renamed).

I just checked and it seems to work. (Looks like the file list is ordered so that the files are renamed before the folders they are in, to avoid the problem I think you were worried about.)

7

Yup, Flat View Mixed works perfectly.

8

That has worKed perfectly. Thanks for the help and for what i think will be a useful future tool.

Mark