File Rename Using Boost Regex and Boost File System

• Download demo VS2017 - 53.7 KB
• Download source VS2017 - 24.9 KB
• Download demo VS2003 - 261.4 KB
• Download source VS2003 - 23.6 KB

Introduction

As a professional programmer, you often have to rename lots of files. While in potential the 'move' command from cmd could do the same, it often ends up in a mess.

Therefore I wrote a simple tool using the Boost libraries regex and filesystem, in which a user supplied directory is scanned and files are renamed by using regex_replace. Note that regex syntax is powerful and complex and therefore I added the possibility to test first the supplied format string.

Simple Use

For a complete overview of boost::regex_replace, please refer to http://www.boost.org/. A simple use was e.g. that a MP3 compressor created '01) Bla.mp3' from my CD's, while I preferred to store them like 'Artist - Bla.mp3'. Feeding '\d{2}\)' as regular expression (without quotes) will instruct the regex engine to search for two numbers followed by a ')'. This match can be replaced by the artists' name.

Code

The code is a simple MFC dialog with two extra classes:

• KFrnDirectoryScanner - Thin wrapper around boost::filesystem
• KFrnMoveFile - Function object which does the actual renaming

The only caveat is that you better first take a snapshot of the content of the directory, before you end up in recursively calling a just renamed file.

Build

The original code is built with Visual Studio 2003. It was necessary that you have Boost (version 1.33) and also the DLLs of the above mentioned libraries (see documentation of Boost or my other article 'Building boost libraries for Visual Studio'). The Visual Studio 2017 version doesn't need Boost anymore since  C++ incorporates regular expressions and filesystem now (C++17).

Room for Improvement

Probably it would be nice to also have:

• a browse button
• combobox which keeps its history

PowerToys

It seems that Micrsoft has added a file renaming tool with regular epxression option to PowerToys. That makes this tool and article pretty much obsolete.

History

• 9 September 2005: initial post
• 19 Februari 2018: update for Visual Studio 2017