Character Actions

The Characters category works on individual characters rather than on words.

• Replace specific characters replaces each of the characters listed in Replace these characters: with the text in With:. Listing ` ` (a space) and replacing it with _ turns my holiday photo.jpg into my_holiday_photo.jpg; listing _-. and replacing with ` ` does the reverse for several characters at once
• Remove specific characters deletes every occurrence of the characters in Remove all these characters:: remove ()[] to get rid of brackets. Ignore case applies to letters
• Keep only specific characters deletes everything that is not in Keep only these characters:. The Add ASCII Character Set, Add Uppercase Letters, Add Lowercase Letters, Add Digits and Add Punctuation buttons fill the list for you, so keeping letters, digits and -_. produces names that survive any file system or web server. Case sensitive, e.g. a ≠ A decides whether an a in the list also keeps A
• Strip leading spaces and Remove trailing spaces remove spaces at the start or end of the name, a common cause of names that look right but do not match
• Remove vowels shortens names, e.g. Documentation.pdf → Dcmnttn.pdf
• Remove emoji removes emoji characters from names coming from phones and chat applications

To remove characters by their position rather than by what they are, see Character positions and ranges.

Example

A folder of documents is going onto a web server that does not cope with accents, brackets and spaces: Résumé (final) v2.pdf should become Resume_final_v2.pdf.

1. Add Remove diacritical marks from the Conversions category as the first action: Resume (final) v2.pdf
2. Add Remove specific characters as the second action with () in Remove all these characters:: Resume final v2.pdf
3. Add Replace specific characters as the third action with a space in Replace these characters: and _ in With:: Resume_final_v2.pdf

The preview updates after each step. See multi-step renames for working with several actions at once.