SUGGESTIONS

Dear Kim,

Thank you so much for your nice program. I am using 3.6 and it has saved me lots of trouble.

I have a few suggestions below.

A "TRUNCATE" FEATURE REQUEST

I suggest including a feature that could be called "truncate," that would truncate all files to the number of characters specified by the user, RATHER THAN simply "eliminating" a given number of characters.

For example, if I have 500 files, some with short names, some, medium, and some, long, and I just want to reduce all of them to ten characters, but I don't want to ASSIGN any particular name, but rather only TRUNCATE whatever name they already have, I think that Advanced Renamer should be able to do it.

As you know, Windows has a problem transferring files with long names or long paths, and it can be very complicated to change the names individually. It can be equally complicated to change the names through a batch process, when all I care about is shortening the long name, short enough so as not to be a problem. TRUNCATE would do the trick.

In other words, if the file name is already short enough, I do not want to shorten it any further; I just want all the long file names in the same batch to be shortened.

You could also adapt this feature to allow the user to determine the maximum length desired for the truncation. In other words, to leave my short names as is, but to shorten my files of 50 or 200 characters down to 30.

Incidentally, I have many MIDI files downloaded from the Internet, that have the URL embedded into the name, and they have extremely long names. If Advanced Renamer could simply search for the marker "www" in each file name, and delete NOT ONLY THAT but everything to the right of that, that would also be wonderful. At the moment I have 29,000 such files to work with in this way.

HELP FILES

One of the biggest issues with AR is that the help files are not embedded into the program, v3.6. I do not have regular access to the Internet, so I cannot get any help sometimes. I understand that you like to update the help files directly in this way, but I think each download should include its own help files.

BUG REPORT

"Set upper case first letter" is a feature that works, but which does not reveal that the process was completed in the affected file window. I have to close and reopen a Windows file window to see whether the changes were really made.

LIVE EDITING SUGGESTION

I suggest allowing manual re-touching of files while they are revealed in the main AR window. It is sometimes easier to access them this way than by going to a system window. You could require an automatic refreshing of the window after such changes, so as not to affect the pending renaming functions, but it would be helpful to have this function.

REGULAR EXPRESSIONS

I suggest allowing mixed expressions, between actual words to be replaced and regular expressions to be applied.

For example, if I want to search through a long list of files called "01 scripture 1", "01 scripture 7", "01 scripture 9", etc., and I want AR to simply find and remove the number at the end, but not the number at the beginning, it seems that I should be able to type in something like "scripture /d" in my "replace" window, to accomplish that task, but this does not work in AR at the moment; I can only choose one function or another.

Perhaps you could allow the user to put the real words in quotes, or in brackets, and the regular expressions as is, or vice versa, so that AR will not confuse the regular expressions with the real words to be replaced. But be careful, because sometimes I want to search and replace quotation marks themselves, in the file names, AR should not misinterpret the quotes as regular expressions.

That's all for now. Thanks again, Kim.

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Reply to #1:

Dear Kim,

I would also request a "truncate" function, it would indeed be one of the best solutions to the recurrent path length problem Windows seems to have when copying files!

Best Wishes,

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Reply to #2:
To truncate a filename you can use the Remove method and configure it like this:
Remove count: 100000
Starting at: 11
Apply to: Name

This should work as an truncate method.

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Reply to #3:
Nice to have a method, but I concur with above, it would be much better to have a truncate option, number of characters or a string to retain. This helps deal with some more complicated file renaming options. I certainly assumed Advanced Renamer had a truncate function, but it doesn't. I vote for an explicit truncate function...

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Reply to #4:
After doing some testing, it is just a familiarity issue. The "remove" method works well

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Reply to #1:
INTERFACE Suggestion:
Allow re-ordering of methods also when they are collapsed, either by enabling the Up/Down move buttons at all times or by allowing drag and drop of methods.
This would result in a better overview when moving methods to another position. Some methods take up so much space when fully expanded that I lose orientation.

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PLEASE, need more >10 recent_methodlists
(or HOWTO)

THANK ;)

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