Filename Using a Regex From Command Prompt Windows

[Invindicator]

Hello fellow exiftool family members,

I pretty much have everything I need to validate my file names and directories for my music files to identify if names are missing characters, spelt incorrectly etc. I wanted to use exiftool to rename files based on the following regex

exiftool -h -ext mp3 -p "${track;s/^(\d+)\/\d+$/$1/;s/^(\d)$/0$1/} ${title;s/(\\|\/|:|\*|\?|<|>|\||"|‘|’|´|;)/_/g;s/&(amp|#39|#xac15|#xb0a8|#xc2a4|#xd0c0|#xc77c|divide|eacute|agrave|ntilde|iexcl|aacute|iquest)_/&$1;/gi}.mp3" .

The above will print the correct file name for all of my files within the -p section (lots of testing was done here and I'm certain names are all correct). The problem as I'm sure ur already aware of just by looking at this is that when I then go to set the file name to be equivalent to the -p statement using

exiftool -h -ext mp3 "-filename=${track;s/^(\d+)\/\d+$/$1/;s/^(\d)$/0$1/} ${title;s/(\\|\/|:|\*|\?|<|>|\||"|‘|’|´|;)/_/g;s/&(amp|#39|#xac15|#xb0a8|#xc2a4|#xd0c0|#xc77c|divide|eacute|agrave|ntilde|iexcl|aacute|iquest)_/&$1;/gi}.mp3" .

The entire thing breaks, creates subdirectories with the regex expr characters in it and so on and so forth. The following message is shown

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Error creating directory ${track;s/^(/d+)///d+$/$1/;s/^(/d)$/0$1/} ${title;s/(//|
Warning: New file name not allowed in Windows (contains reserved characters) - ./01 Here's To Never Growing Up.mp3
    1 directories scanned
    0 image files updated
    1 files weren't updated due to errors

I'm fairly certain its because of the forward slashes within the regex and have tried swapping these for some other separators (# for example) but even this doesn't seem to work. Maybe I missed one that does but I cannot be sure. I would prefer to keep the forward slashes all the same though. My question is how might I got about tackling this problem which seems like it is becoming more difficult then it should. I would prefer for a one line command I can run from a batch file or command prompt in Windows rather than having to create a tag/function inside the config file as I feel it would be simpler and I already have all of the logic available in the one line, I just need to figure out a way to avoid those pesky /

As always thank you so much for any help
Regards, Nick

[StarGeek]

The equal sign = is used to assign a static value.  In this case you're assigning the text of your RegEx to the filename.

The lesser/greater than signs </> are used to copy tag values.  Change -filename=${track;... to -filename<${track;... and your command should work.

[Invindicator]

Ahhhh awesome thanks Stargeek. I assumed that the < was only when reading in from on specific tag and for the format I wanted with the " - " in between them it wouldnt work. But your explanation is perfect!

I have fixed up the command and run a dry test using

exiftool -h -r -ext mp3 "-testname<${partofset;s/^(\d+)\/\d+$/$1-/}${track;s/^(\d+)\/\d+$/$1/;s/^(\d)$/0$1/} ${title;s/(\\|\/|:|\*|\?|&lt;|&gt;|\||&quot;|&lsquo;|&rsquo;|&acute;|;)/_/g;s/&(amp|#39|#xac15|#xb0a8|#xc2a4|#xd0c0|#xc77c|divide|eacute|agrave|ntilde|iexcl|aacute|iquest)_/&$1;/gi}.mp3" . -if "$partofset"

The majority of my output is

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Warning: File name is unchanged - ./Neil Diamond/Hot August Night/1-01 Prologue _ Crunchy Granola Suite.mp3

which I assume is what I want it to be, however there are quite a few files which display

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Warning: File './Compilations/Housework Songs/1-06 Moving on Up.mp3' already exists - ./Compilations/Housework Songs/1-06 Moving On Up.mp3

instead.

I have managed to work out the second message occurs because the files have the same name but there may be letters with different case e.g. trying to rename "Cloud in the Sky" to "Cloud In The Sky". Is there a way to rename these files to have the desired case without first renaming them to something else and renaming them back

[StarGeek]

Is there a way to rename these files to have the desired case without first renaming them to something else and renaming them back

Under Windows, with Exiftool?  Short answer, no, not with exiftool that I've been able to discover.  It seems that it should be possible because you can change case through Explorer and using ren on the command line, as well as various renaming utilities, without (apparently) going through renaming to something else.  But it doesn't work when I tried through exiftool (which is Perl) and PHP (or it didn't a few years back), for example.

Long answer, yes.  But that comes with it's own pitfalls as you would have to fiddle with the registry to activate case sensitivity and then have to deal with Text.txt and text.TXT being completely different files.

[Invindicator]

Thank you once again StarGeek. That's all well. I implemented a temporary approach of renaming the file to something different on the first run through and then iterating through the files again to rename them to the correct name while I was waiting for a reply. I seems quick enough for my purposes and does the job it needs to do. Would be helpful to maybe have an option to do this in the future but at the same time I understand entirely while Phil has done what he has