Batch Renaming of Files in a Directory

Question

Is there an easy way to rename a group of files already contained in a directory, using Python?

Example: I have a directory full of *.doc files an

Answer 1

If you don't mind using regular expressions, then this function would give you much power in renaming files:

import re, glob, os

def renamer(files, pattern, replacement):
    for pathname in glob.glob(files):
        basename= os.path.basename(pathname)
        new_filename= re.sub(pattern, replacement, basename)
        if new_filename != basename:
            os.rename(
              pathname,
              os.path.join(os.path.dirname(pathname), new_filename))

So in your example, you could do (assuming it's the current directory where the files are):

renamer("*.doc", r"^(.*)\.doc$", r"new(\1).doc")

but you could also roll back to the initial filenames:

renamer("*.doc", r"^new\((.*)\)\.doc", r"\1.doc")

and more.