Removing certain characters from about 35000+ files

Advanced Renamer forum
#1 : 30/04-15 03:46
jademonkee
jademonkee
Posts: 2
Hello,
I have a very large music collection stored on my Windows PC that I am in the process of copying over (to later regularly sync) to a Mac formatted external hard drive over CIFS/Samba using ChronoSync.
Unfortunately, the sync app, ChronoSync, errors out when it hits certain special characters, so I'm looking for a method to replace those characters with Latin ones (that is, characters with no diacritical marks).
Now, I've modified the 'Weboptimized filenames' preset to do this HOWEVER, I can only add 2000 items to the batch at any one time.
This is a problem, as my 'Albums' directory contains about 38000 files, and the only sub folders I have that could be used to split the batches up are 'Artist' folders, of which there are around 1200 (directory format is ..\Albums\[ARTIST NAME]\[ALBUM NAME]\[SONGS]).
Is there a way to have it work on my entire music directory? That is, work in batches of 2000 files (if that's the limit), or to just systematically go through the whole folder? Or to even only add files/folders that contain these non-standard characters (there is likely less than 2000 of them)?
I'm happy to go to command line if there's a way to reference and use my modified 'Weboptimized filenames' preset.
Many thanks for your help.


30/04-15 03:46 - edited 30/04-15 05:52
#2 : 30/04-15 06:36
jademonkee
jademonkee
Posts: 2
Reply to #1:
Solved it!
So I figured that the best way around the 2000 file count limitation was to do a search in Windows for any of the characters listed in the 'Weboptimized filenames' preset. Unfortunately, however, it wasn't quite as simple as just searching for "å OR ø OR æ or ..." etc, as Windows would also return any of the equivalent Latin alphabet characters, too (such as 'a' 'o' etc), which was absolutely useless to me.
To exclude these characters from the search results, I had to format the string as such:

filename:~="å" OR ~="ø" OR ~="æ" OR ~="à" OR ~="á" OR ~="â" OR ~="ã" OR ~="ä" OR ~="ç" OR ~="è" OR ~="é" OR ~="ê" OR ~="ë" OR ~="ì" OR ~="í" OR ~="î" OR ~="ï" OR ~="ñ" OR ~="ò" OR ~="ó" OR ~="ô" OR ~="õ" OR ~="ö" OR ~="ù" OR ~="ú" OR ~="û" OR ~="ü" ~="ý" OR ~="ÿ"

This returned the 1000 or so results from my music folder. I simply dragged the files into AdvancedRenamer, and ran my modified 'Weboptimized filenames' preset, then followed by switching to folder mode and dragging the folders over, too.

Now let's just hope that there aren't any other tricky characters left in my directory (I'll find out when I run the sync on my Mac, and report back if so).


30/04-15 06:36 - edited 30/04-15 06:37