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How Do I Strip Extraneous Info From the Name Of a File?

Good morning Gary… I’ve got well over a hundred movies that I had collected over the years from DVD’s that I have purchased and from friends loaded onto an external hard drive. I ‘copied’ the list from my Finder window and ‘pasted’ it onto a Numbers spread sheet that I put in my Notes app. for handy reference. To make it more pleasant to look at, is there a simple way of deleting all the extra information (i.e. Blu-Ray, 1972, 720p, .mp4) within the item name?

Thank you… Doug Brandt
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Doug

Comments: 3 Responses to “How Do I Strip Extraneous Info From the Name Of a File?”

    5 years ago

    Is the list in Numbers, or is it in Notes? You'll have much more power over it if it is in Numbers. So if you have copied it into Notes, I would go back to the Numbers version, or copy it back into Numbers.

    Then I would use the Text functions there to deconstruct the name. But I'm not sure what it is you want, so it is hard for me to suggest exact functions. I'd need to see an example and know if the naming is consistent for all of them.

    Of course there is always the manual option. You say there are over 100. So that's no that many. If you aren't familiar with using complex formulas in Numbers, it could just be quicker to change or retype the list. At 10 seconds per title, that's 25 minutes if there are 150 titles. And if it is just a matter of selecting some of the text and deleting it, then it would probably be more like 10 minutes.

    It would make sense to use a formula in Numbers if there were many more titles though.

    Doug
    5 years ago

    from this... "Hidden.Figures.2016.720p.Blu-Ray.mp4".... to this.... "Hidden Figures 2016"

    5 years ago

    If it was me, I would just do it manually. It would take 10 minutes. Get rid of the period between Hidden and Figures and 2016 then delete the rest. Repeat.
    If you really want to do it in Numbers, you would use the SUBSTITUTE function. You would replace "." with " ". So column B would have the values of column A but with spaces instead of periods. Then column C would take the value of column B and replace "720p" with "" (empty). Then D would get rid of "Blu-Ray", etc. I'm sure you probably have variations like 1080p and DVD and all sorts of things to get rid of. The last column would have what you want so I'd copy and paste from that.

    Note that you can do the same thing with search and replace in TextEdit. Just search and replace all the periods, then the "Blu-Ray" and so on.

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