80 – Bulk renaming files

80 – Bulk renaming files#

To change the name of a file while preserving its extension you can use the method pathlib.PurePath.with_stem. Note that this creates a new path object and doesn’t do any file renaming automatically. That is why the method with_stem is defined in PurePath, although it is also available from Path.

If you pair with_stem with rename, you can easily bulk-rename files in a folder.

Suppose the folder reports contains multiple reports in different formats, like PDF files, Excel files, and the occasional screenshot(!). To rename all files, you could write something like

from pathlib import Path

report_folder = Path("reports")  # PDFs, Excel files, ...

for idx, report in enumerate(report_folder.iterdir(), start=1):
    report.rename(report_pdf.with_stem(f"report{idx:03}"))

# Produces:
# reports/report001.pdf
# reports/report002.xlsx
# ...