I have multiple folders each with the name of a person, with the first name(s) first and the surname last. I want to change the folder names so that the surname is first followed by a comma and then the first name(s) follow.
As an example, in the folder Test, i have:
C:/Test/John Smith
C:/Test/Fred Jones
C:/Test/Ben Jack Martin
and i want to make this:
C:/Test/Smith, John
C:/Test/Jones, Fred
C:/Test/Martin, Ben Jack
I tried some things with os.rename but i couldn't seem to make it work with the varying name length, and i wasn't sure how to insert the comma into the surname.
Also, some of the folder names are already in the correct form, so i need to skip these folders during the renaming. I think you can do this by just adding an if, so that if the folder name contains a comma it will continue.
Otherwise, the surname will always be the last word in the folder name.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
You can write it out fairly straight-forward, using os.listdir and the os.path functions:
import os
basedir = 'C:/Test'
for fn in os.listdir(basedir):
if not os.path.isdir(os.path.join(basedir, fn)):
continue # Not a directory
if ',' in fn:
continue # Already in the correct form
if ' ' not in fn:
continue # Invalid format
firstname,_,surname = fn.rpartition(' ')
os.rename(os.path.join(basedir, fn),
os.path.join(basedir, surname + ', ' + firstname))