Rename files in a Windows directory

Question

I am currently trying to learn python by writing a script that will clean up my downloads folder by preserving the name of the object while removing special characters and extra data from the folder/file name.

ie:

../Completed Downloads/random.download.here.x264.team
../Completed Download/random download here

as well as

file.name.randomstring_randomstring.mkv
file name randomstring randomstring (date).mkv

I've been searching for a while now, but while I can make a script that sees these files - I can't seem to get it to just pluck out each individual special character and rename it. When I do, I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python27\Scripts\plexprep.py", line 7, in <module>
    os.rename(dir, dir.replace(".", "").lower())
WindowsError: [Error 2] The system cannot find the file specified

here is the start of my script:

import fnmatch
import os

#Matches directories for Plex and renames directories to help Plex crawl.
for dir in os.listdir('F:\Downloads\Completed Downloads'):
    if fnmatch.fnmatch(dir, '*'):
        os.rename(dir, dir.replace(".", "").lower())

#Matches filenames for Plex and renames files/subdirectories to help Plex crawl.

Answer 1

As @cricket_007 said in the comment, you should escape backslashes by adding r in front of the path:

for dir in os.listdir(r'F:\Downloads\Completed Downloads'):

However the WindowsError is caused by the something else: In your loop, dir will only be the name of the subfolder, but not the complete path to it. A possible solution would be:

base = r'F:\Downloads\Completed Downloads'
for dir in os.listdir(base):
    path = os.path.join(base, dir)
    # Now use your os.rename() logic