tmilix.blogg.se - Name mangler windows

#Name mangler windows how to#
#Name mangler windows code#
#Name mangler windows mac#
#Name mangler windows windows#

I prefer to use an underscore, which tends to provide a more-legible final filename. In the Replace box, you can put whatever you like if you leave it blank, the special characters will be removed completely. Because the backslash is also a special character, we need to use another backslash to tell the regular expression engine that it should read this as a normal backslash character. The backslash is normally used to force certain characters that the regular expression engine uses for certain operations to instead be interpreted as normal characters (see the Syntax section of the Wikipedia entry for more details).

There are two backslashes because the backslash has special significance in the regular expression engine.

Put another way, it searches for slash or backslash or colon or asterisk, or etc.

The characters are grouped in square brackets, which tells the regular expression engine to find any occurrences of any of the listed characters within the filename.

This looks vaguely like the list of characters to be found, with a couple of exceptions: Set the Select Task pop-up to Find and Replace, and check the “Query is a regular expression” box. Launch Name Mangler, and (again, already backed up, right?) drag in your files to be renamed. While you could build an advanced mode query to replace each character, one by one, regular expressions provide a much faster way. As an example, consider these demo files: |/slashes/\are/\beauty\|.jpg Although there are many things one needs to look at when moving files across systems, Name Mangler can help remove the obvious problem characters.įor NTFS, the non-allowed characters are /\:*?"|, and you can get rid of all of these in one command, using Name Mangler’s ability to process regular expressions. The NTFS (used in Windows), for instance, doesn’t allow a number of characters that you can use on the Mac.

#Name mangler windows mac#

Sometimes you’ll need to move files between your Mac and other computers that may not be as lenient about what characters are allowed in filenames. If you do this often, consider saving your query as a droplet (Create Droplet in the toolbar), to give you simple access to the query again in the future. Here’s how it looks in action (click on the image for the full-sized version):

The if block is standard to most Advanced mode queries all it does is append the file’s extension, if it has one. You can add as many distinct find commands as you need just make sure you enclose each in opening and closing square brackets. The find searches for the first term ( %20, for instance) in the second term ( contains the filename), and replaces it with the third term (a space, in this case).

#Name mangler windows code#

The code consists of two separate find statements, and one if statement. In the code box to the right of the file list, enter this code: [find In Name Mangler, set the Select Task pop-up to Advanced, and drag in your (already backed up, just in case, right?) files from Finder. Instead, you can do repeated substitutions using Name Mangler’s Advanced mode. You could convert these by using Name Mangler’s Find & Replace mode twice, once for each character, but that’s a pain. But on your Mac, you’d rather have actual spaces and hyphens, obviously. The %20 is a space, and %2D is a hyphen these values are URL encoded on certain web servers, to make sure they’re properly transmitted. Let’s say you’ve downloaded some images from a picture sharing site, but they come down with badly-mangled names, like this: Ocean%20at%Morning%20%2D%20Hawaii.jpg This blog post explains some methods to use when those menu items aren’t enough.

#Name mangler windows windows#

Name Mangler 3 includes two entries in its Presets menu-Dumb Down for Windows and Trim Whitespace-that can fix many filename issues.

#Name mangler windows how to#

In today’s how-to, I’ll show you how to do both of those things with some not-too-complicated Name Mangler queries. Another good use, though, is to clean up filenames-either to remove odd characters (which can happen with web-downloaded files), or to remove characters not allowed in other filesystems, such as NTFS. Name Mangler can be used for many file renaming purposes many people use it to change the generic IMG_ (or whatever) prefix their camera applies to all photos.