How to remove part of file name using a regex expression with Powershell?-CodePudding

I have a bunch of files names as such:

Belinda Carlisle - Mad About You-Xmdtjwmr9zq.mp4
Air Supply - All Out of Love-Jwdzeumnrmi.mp4
Blue Savannah Song - Erasure-Wxoutwk8jv8.mp4
Breathe - How Can I Fall (1988)-Pwz4erdjzra.mp4

I would like to be able to trim out the suffix of random characters. I got some help with formulating a regex, and I slapped together a two-liner in PowerShell, and it works. The only caveat is that I have to first filter by the regex before piping it to 'rename-item', otherwise, it adds two extensions to the filename like Belinda Carlisle -Mad About You.mp4.mp4 for the filenames that are 'clean' - aka without the extraneous suffix.

Can this be done another way so that I don't have to filter by matching regex and achieve the same thing? Not being nit-picky, just curious.

Here's the PowerShell expression I cobbled together.

Get-ChildItem $targetpath -file | 
where-object {$_.name -match "-[a-z\d] (?=\.[^.] $)"} | 
ForEach-Object {
Rename-Item -Path $_.FullName -NewName ('{0}{1}' -f ($_.Name -replace "-[a-z\d] (?=\.[^.] $).*","$1"), $_.Extension )
}

CodePudding user response：

Your regex can be simplified to just this.

Clear-Host
(@'
Belinda Carlisle - Mad About You-Xmdtjwmr9zq.mp4
Air Supply - All Out of Love-Jwdzeumnrmi.mp4
Blue Savannah Song - Erasure-Wxoutwk8jv8.mp4
Breathe - How Can I Fall (1988)-Pwz4erdjzra.mp4
'@) -replace '-[\w]([^.] )'

# Results
<#
Belinda Carlisle - Mad About You.mp4
Air Supply - All Out of Love.mp4
Blue Savannah Song - Erasure.mp4
Breathe - How Can I Fall (1988).mp4
#>

CodePudding user response：

Offering an alternate solution to RegEx, you can use the string methods against the BaseName property then concatenating the result to the Extension.

Get-ChildItem $targetpath -Filter '*-*-*' -File | 
    Rename-Item -NewName { $_.BaseName.Substring(0,$_.BaseName.LastIndexOf('-'))   $_.Extension }