Rename old files with regex to change date

Basement
1

I have got about 6,000 old daily notes that I want to bring into Obsidian. Unfortunately, the file names are formatted like this:

54 Wednesday, 12 December 2012.md
55 Thursday, 13 December 2012.md
56 Friday, 14 December 2012.md

I would like to change them to:

2012-12-12-Wednesday.md
2012-12-13-Thursday.md
2012-12-14-Friday.md

Is there a way I could use regex or anything else to rename all the files?

Thanks

Angel

1 Like
2

Looking for a tool that can do this myself. Let us know if you find one, it is very useful!

3
4

Many thanks. I have tried a few renaming apps, but can’t get anything to work as I need it to. If I can figure out the regex, I will post it here. I have managed to get the files down to this format:

Friday/5/October/2012
Friday/12/October/2012

However, I can’t get the regex to ‘find’ the right pattern and then replace it as:

2012-10-05-Friday
2012-10-12-Friday

Hope to get there eventually.

Angel

5

This may help

regexpal.com

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I am very grateful. And edging closer to a solution.

Thanks

Angel

7

With thanks to @stevelw for the pointers, I devised a convoluted method that worked. I am sure someone else would be able to come up with a simpler solution. Here goes (on macOS):

  • Copy original files in Finder to create a backup
  • Download Renamer
  • Find comma, replace with nothing
  • Find close bracket, replace with nothing
  • Find space, replace with underscore
  • Remove prefixes (in Finder), using the Automator Quick Action described in this thread
  • Find underscore, replace with forward slash
  • Add leading zero (for days with a single digit only) using regex
  • FIND:
  • \b(\d)(?=/)
  • REPLACE:
  • 0$1
  • Find and replace months with digits: January = 01, February = 02, etc
  • All the files now in dddd/DD/MM/YYYY format
  • Use Regex to change the order of the four identifiable parts
  • FIND:
  • ^(.+?)/(?<day>\d{1,2})/\b(?<month>\d{1,2})/(?<year>\d{2,4})\b
  • REPLACE
  • $4-$3-$2-$1
  • All files now in YYYY-MM-DD-dddd
  • Copied files into Obsidian

Angel

2 Likes
8

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