remove characters from every file name in directory with python

Question

So I am writing a piece of code that needs to iterate through hundreds of files in a directory. With every filt it needs to filter out certain pieces of information in it then put it in a new file with a modified name.

For example, a file called 1100006_0.vcf or 5100164_12.vcf must have a file created called 1100006.vcf and 5100164.vcf respectively. Can you point me in the right direction for this?

You might want to be more specific about that constraint. Are you just looking to remove everything after the underscore (including the underscore)? — dtc, Dec 08 '20 at 02:19
yes, only including and after the underscore, and the only files I am working with are .vcf s oyes. — Salim Farhat, Dec 08 '20 at 03:25

RavinderSingh13 · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-08T03:41:36.927

EDIT: To make code Generic and rename file names from one directory to any other directory/folder try following. I have kept this program inside /tmp and renamed the files inside /tmp/test and it worked fine(in a Linux system).

#!/usr/bin/python3
import os
DIRNAME="/tmp/test"
files = os.listdir(DIRNAME)
for f in files:
    if '.vcf' in f:
        newname = f.split('_')[0]
        newname = newname + '.vcf'
        os.rename(os.path.join(DIRNAME,f), os.path.join(DIRNAME,newname))

Since you want to rename the files, so we could use os here. Written and tested with shown samples in python3, I have given DIRNAME as /tmp you could give your directory where you want to look for files.

#!/usr/bin/python3
import os

DIRNAME="/tmp"
files = os.listdir(DIRNAME)
for f in files:
    if '.vcf' in f:
        newname = f.split('_')[0]
        newname = newname + '.vcf'
        os.rename(f, newname)

score 0 · Answer 2 · edited Dec 08 '20 at 06:37

As posted by RavinderSingh13, the code was fine, the only issue was that in renaming them, I would have two files of the same name (the difference between them was the underscore and number that I needed removed).

#!/usr/bin/python3
import os

DIRNAME="/tmp"
files = os.listdir(DIRNAME)
for f in files:
    if '.vcf' in f:
        newname = f.split('_')[0]
        newname = newname + '.vcf'
        os.rename(f, newname)

remove characters from every file name in directory with python

2 Answers2