Best Practice for renaming a bunch of files

[reaper1gulf]

Hey guys, so I'm still fairly new to Autoit and coding in general. What I'm trying to do is rename a bunch of files that are 20 characters long, first 7 characters are always the same, the next 8 are variable and the next 5 are constant, so it would look something like this: A000000ukaelsqc00000.pdf (could be a jpg, tif, bmp as well). There is normally more than 30 files in the folder daily. What I'm attempting to do is rename the file the exact same name, but with a _pdf.pdf (same for other file types). Should I use an array to do this? Or is there another way to accomplish this for a beginner? Thanks in advance

Edited April 17, 2014 by reaper1gulf

[JLogan3o13]

Just to clarify, you want to change A000000ukaelsqc00000.pdf to A000000ukaelsqc00000_pdf.pdf, A000000ukaelsqc00000.tif to A000000ukaelsqc00000_tif.tif, etc. You're not actually changing anything with the first 20 characters, correct?

[reaper1gulf]

that's correct, generally they are PDF's, sometimes there can be other file types. I want to keep the same first 20 characters and add a _pdf to the file. So A000000ukaelsqc00000.pdf would turn into A000000ukaelsqc00000_pdf.pdf

[JLogan3o13]

So I would do something like this:

Beginning with this path as an example:

I would use one array to contain the files, and another to split the file names, like so:

#include <File.au3>

Local $aArray, $aSplit, $sPath

$sPath = @DesktopDir & "\Test"
$aArray = _FileListToArray($sPath, "*",  1, False)

   For $i = 1 To $aArray[0]
      $aSplit = StringSplit($aArray[$i], ".")
      FileMove($sPath & "\" & $aArray[$i], $sPath & "\" & $aSplit[1] & "_" & $aSplit[2] & "." & $aSplit[2])
   Next

[reaper1gulf]

Thanks Logan, I'll give this a try and let you know how it works

[JohnQSmith]

So I would do something like this:

 

Since we're going to "give a man a fish" today, here's a CMD prompt line you can run in your folder that will do the same thing.

for /f "usebackq tokens=1,2 delims=." %i in (`dir /a-d /b *.*`) do ren %i.%j %i_%j.%j

Edited April 17, 2014 by JohnQSmith

[JLogan3o13]

We're giving them AutoIt fish, not command line guppies

[reaper1gulf]

Thank you Logan, all I had to do was change the directory and it works like a charm! And after looking at what you wrote I realize where my code was messed up. Thank you