Renaming a Word document and saving its filename with its first 10 letters - ms-word

Question

I have recovered some Word documents from a corrupted hard drive using a piece of software called photorec. The problem is that the documents' names can't be recovered; they are all renamed by a sequence of numbers. There are over 2000 documents to sort through and I was wondering if I could rename them using some automated process.
Is there a script I could use to find the first 10 letters in the document and rename it with that? It would have to be able to cope with multiple documents having the same first 10 letters and so not write over documents with the same name. Also, it would have to avoid renaming the document with illegal characters (such as '?', '*', '/', etc.)
I only have a little bit of experience with Python, C, and even less with bash programming in Linux, so bear with me if I don't know exactly what I'm doing if I have to write a new script.

Answer 1

How about VBScript? Here is a sketch:
FolderName = "C:\Docs\"
Set fs = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set fldr = fs.GetFolder(Foldername)
Set ws = CreateObject("Word.Application")
For Each f In fldr.Files
If Left(f.name,2)<>"~$" Then
If InStr(f.Type, "Microsoft Word") Then
MsgBox f.Name
Set doc = ws.Documents.Open(Foldername & f.Name)
s = vbNullString
i = 1
Do While Trim(s) = vbNullString And i <= doc.Paragraphs.Count
s = doc.Paragraphs(i)
s = CleanString(Left(s, 10))
i = i + 1
Loop
doc.Close False
If s = "" Then s = "NoParas"
s1 = s
i = 1
Do While fs.FileExists(s1)
s1 = s & i
i = i + 1
Loop
MsgBox "Name " & Foldername & f.Name & " As " & Foldername & s1 _
& Right(f.Name, InStrRev(f.Name, "."))
'' This uses copy, because it seems safer
f.Copy Foldername & s1 & Right(f.Name, InStrRev(f.Name, ".")), False
'' MoveFile will copy the file:
'' fs.MoveFile Foldername & f.Name, Foldername & s1 _
'' & Right(f.Name, InStrRev(f.Name, "."))
End If
End If
Next
msgbox "Done"
ws.Quit
Set ws = Nothing
Set fs = Nothing
Function CleanString(StringToClean)
''http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms974570.aspx
Dim objRegEx
Set objRegEx = CreateObject("VBScript.RegExp")
objRegEx.IgnoreCase = True
objRegEx.Global = True
''Find anything not a-z, 0-9
objRegEx.Pattern = "[^a-z0-9]"
CleanString = objRegEx.Replace(StringToClean, "")
End Function

Answer 2

Word documents are stored in a custom format which places a load of binary cruft on the beginning of the file.
The simplest thing would be to knock something up in Python that searched for the first line beginning with ASCII chars. Here you go:
#!/usr/bin/python
import glob
import os
for file in glob.glob("*.doc"):
f = open(file, "rb")
new_name = ""
chars = 0
char = f.read(1)
while char != "":
if 0 < ord(char) < 128:
if ord("a") <= ord(char) <= ord("z") or ord("A") <= ord(char) <= ord("Z") or ord("0") <= ord(char) <= ord("9"):
new_name += char
else:
new_name += "_"
chars += 1
if chars == 100:
new_name = new_name[:20] + ".doc"
print "renaming " + file + " to " + new_name
f.close()
break;
else:
new_name = ""
chars = 0
char = f.read(1)
if new_name != "":
os.rename(file, new_name)
NOTE: if you want to glob multiple directories you'll need to change the glob line accordingly. Also this takes no account of whether the file you're trying to rename to already exists, so if you have multiple docs with the same first few chars then you'll need to handle that.
I found the first chunk of 100 ASCII chars in a row (if you look for less than that you end up picking up doc keywords and such) and then used the first 20 of these to make the new name, replacing anything that's not a-z A-Z or 0-9 with underscores to avoid file name issues.