Renaming one file (and nothing more than ONE file) using PowerShell - powershell

Question

The problem
I constantly find myself in need of quick-method to rename a random file here and there while I work. I need to bring these filenames down to a structure compatible with web standards and some personal needs. A few examples below:
When I find I need
---------------------------------- -----------------------------------------
Welcome to the party.JPG welcome_to_the_party.jpg
Instructions (and some other tips) instructions_and_some_other_tips
Bar Drinks – The Best Recipes bar_drinks_the_best_recipes
La mañana del águila y el ratón la_manana_del_aguila_y_el_raton
Basically I need:
all uppercase characters to become lowercase
spaces to become underscore
some other special characters and diacritics for other languages to become their closest match (á is a, é is e, ç is c, and so on...)
Symbols like ( ) [ ] { } ' ; , to completely dissapear
Perhaps some replacements (optional) as: # = no; # = at or & = and
Not the question, but just FYI and you can see the big picture
I will be using a registry entry [HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT*\shell...] so I can call a batch file and/or a PowerShell Script by right-clicking the desired file, passing the argument information (the file in question) to the script that way.
My guesses
I have been looking closely at PowerShell Scripts, but I am not very knowledgeable about this area yet and all the solutions provided so far are addressing the entire folder (Dir/Get-ChildItem) instead of a specific file.
For example, I was successful using the line below (PowerShell) to replace all spaces by underscore, but then it affects other files in the directory as well.
Dir | Rename-Item –NewName { $_.name –replace “ “,”_“ }
Again, I do not need to address this problem for the entire folder, since I already have ways of doing so using software like Total Commander.
Thanks for any help you can give me.
Ruy

Answer 1

may be this code can help you
function Remove-Diacritics([string]$String)
{
$objD = $String.Normalize([Text.NormalizationForm]::FormD)
$sb = New-Object Text.StringBuilder
for ($i = 0; $i -lt $objD.Length; $i++) {
$c = [Globalization.CharUnicodeInfo]::GetUnicodeCategory($objD[$i])
if($c -ne [Globalization.UnicodeCategory]::NonSpacingMark) {
[void]$sb.Append($objD[$i])
}
}
return("$sb".Normalize([Text.NormalizationForm]::FormC))
}
function Clean-String([string]$String)
{
return(Remove-Diacritics ($String.ToLower() -replace "#", "no" -replace "\#", "at" -replace "&", "and" -replace "\(|\)|\[|\]|\{|\}|'|;|\,", "" -replace " ", "_"))
}
$youfile="C:\tmp4\121948_DRILLG.tif"
$younewnamefile=Clean-String $youfile
Rename-Item -Path $youfile $younewnamefile

Answer 2

Place this script somewhere (let's call it WebRename.ps1):
$old = $args -join ' '
$new = $old.ToLower().Replace(' ', '_')
# add all the remaining transformations you need here
Rename-Item $old $new
In the registry use this as the command (with your own path of course):
PowerShell -c C:\WebRename.ps1 "%1"

Answer 3

If your looking to be able to do this quickly and always want the same changes to be made you can add the following function to a .psm1 file and then place the file in one of your module folders (C:\Program Files\WindowsPowerShell\Modules is the most common one) you'll be able to just call WebRename-File filePath any time you need to quickly rename a file, the function is set up in such a way as to work fine if you pass in a single file path or you can pipe the results of a get-childitem to it if you ever do find the need to do bulk renames.
function WebRename-File {
param(
[parameter(Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
$filePath
)
begin{}
Process{
foreach($path in $filePath){
$newPath = $path.ToLower()
$newPath = $newPath.Replace(' ','_')
###add other operations here###
Rename-Item -Path $path -NewName $newPath
}
}
end{}
}