Bulk renaming files with Python to make them more consistent/easier to type. Not especially difficult, but it comes up surprisingly often.

rename_files.py

"""
Renaming files to make them more consistent/easier to type.
"""
import unicodedata
import re
from pathlib import Path


# You can use whatever function you prefer, but Django's slugify is pretty slick 
def slugify(value, allow_unicode=False):
    """
    Taken from https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/utils/text.py
    Convert to ASCII if 'allow_unicode' is False. Convert spaces or repeated
    dashes to single dashes. Remove characters that aren't alphanumerics,
    underscores, or hyphens. Convert to lowercase. Also strip leading and
    trailing whitespace, dashes, and underscores.
    """
    value = str(value)
    if allow_unicode:
        value = unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", value)
    else:
        value = (
            unicodedata.normalize("NFKD", value)
            .encode("ascii", "ignore")
            .decode("ascii")
        )
    value = re.sub(r"[^\w\s-]", "", value.lower())
    return re.sub(r"[-\s]+", "_", value).strip("-_")


# Get all files contained within a directory and its subdirectories
to_rename = (x for x in SOME_DIRECTORY.rglob("**/*") if x.is_file())

# Rename all paths accordingly
for path in to_rename:
    new_path = path.with_stem(slugify(path.stem))
    print(path)
    print(new_path)
    path.rename(new_path)