guidance / assistance needed

Hi!

I'm a total n00b with this kind of stuff and not the most gifted at scripting. One would think after using computers since 1986, I'd be better at this sort of thing, but, no. I have an interesting problem, and DL'd Advanced Renamer to help, I hope. I have about 35,000 files that need renaming. It's a combo pile of docs, mostly epub, pdf. Right now, they look like this:
Type 1 - most common:

docName - John Doe.pdf

The other most common looks like this:

(fooText) docName - Jane Doe.epub

The char length of FooText varies from 8 to as many as 20 chars. It all needs to go away.

There are other files (mp3, flac, and a few mobi files) but I can do those by hand as needed - they are low priority, and there's only about 1000 of them. The other files (pdf and epub) are high priority. They need to look like this when done:

Doe, Jane - docName.epub

or

Doe, John - docName.pdf

I have no idea where to begin, Doing this by hand would take hundreds of hours - not an option.

My guess is that I should probably deal with the fooText crap first, but the Remove function goes by char count, not content. Anyway, once that is somehow resolved, then I suppose the names at the end need to be swapped, then cut and pasted at the front or simply swapped with the text in the fileName. I have zero idea how to accomplish that in this app.

I looked at the extended scripting features and they are rather opaque and I have no idea how to make them work.

I am hoping someone here can help.

kindness and best wishes to all.

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Based on your two examples:
docName - John Doe.pdf
(fooText) docName - Jane Doe.epub
and "The char length of FooText varies from 8 to as many as 20 chars. It all needs to go away.", try the following "Replace Method":

Text to be replaced:
(\(.+\) ?)?(.+) - (\S+) (.+)
Replace with:
\4, \3 - \2

Occurrence: All
Case sensitive: Untick (but does not matter)
Use regular expressions: Tick
Apply to: Name

BTW, I did something very similar to this in another thread, so if you're interested in finding out more you could search for it. I don't remember the post exactly, so can't give any hints what to search for :-) If this forum had a feature to search by a user's post, I could search for my posts (I'm a relatively low volume poster), but from what I can gather it doesn't.

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Reply to #2:
Thanks! That helped a lot!
I agree - this forum would benefit from a good search mechanism!
cheers!

HW

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