Could someone here help me out with a Regular Expression?

Here goes...

I have Filenames that are Very Long (Lots of Characters)...

What I need to do is shorten them down to 28 characters including the dot and 3 character extension (keeping in mind that spaces and () should be allowed in the filename...So, for example:

A Very Long Filename (28 chr).exe

Just used the (parenthesis at the end) to show example, but they may be located anywhere in the filename.

I am using RegexBuddy 2.21 to do my coding.

Tia,
-Brian

This is just a pattern you could use of how to grab what you want.

([^.]{1,28})[^.]*(\..{3})

Where the first parenthesis contains the filename you'll use and the last contains the dot and extension. Then all you have to do is rename the file with first set and second set of parenthesis.

I know it could be improved but lets explain the code.

First set of parenthesis grabs everything that is not a dot from 1-28 characters, next is to move through all the rest of the characters that aren't dots and the second set of parenthesis grabs the dot and the extension.

Cheers,

MC

Hi,

Thank you for your reply, however, I can't seem to get it working...Could you shine some light on this bit for me? I just don't get the concept of how to make the code work. I opened up Editpad pro, and opened the search, copied the regex code you gave me into the search box, and then hit replace...Nothing worked.

Let me shed a bit of light here, I have a text file that I made like this, from an Ms-Dos box, I did: "Dir /x/b>files.txt" (without quotes) and got a text file with the contents of that directory. Now I am trying to take that text file and shorten all the filenames in that text file down to 28 characters including the period and three letter extension. I want the filenames to be shortend like this: From the left of the dot (before the extension) I want to cut the filename. Example: If the filename was:

A very interesting filename that needs to be shortend.exe

It would now be:

A very interesting file.exe

The above codes show the long filename and the one below that shows it cut down to only 28 characters INCLUDING the Extension.

And remember the filename will include parenthesis ( ), brackets [ ] spaces, and or numbers so the reg expression must be able to interept that as well.

Can you help further?

Tia for your time, and efforts!
-Brian

Hey,

If regular expressions seems to difficult to accomplish this, I could even use a basic file renaming tool, but I can't seem to find one that will batch rename the actual files to only 28 characters including the extension. Might you know of any such freeware tool?

Tia,
-Brian

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