I need help renaming a file using regular expressions in Bridge.

Question

Hi,
I work at a university, and we are working through files for our Thesis and Dissertations. We have been renaming them to make them more consistent. I am just wondering if there is a regular expression that could help with this process?
Here is come examples of current file names;
THESIS 1981 H343G
Thesis 1981 g996e
THESIS-1981-A543G
I don't need to change the actual names of the files. just how they are formatted.
Proper case on Thesis.
Hyphens(-) in all white space.
First letter capital, last letter lowercase on the call no (H343g)
So the list above should look like;
Thesis-1981-H343g
Thesis-1981-G996e
Thesis-1981-A543g
I have seen people do some pretty cool things with regular expressions! Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

You would be better off using a script to do this as an example as I don't think it would be possible in the Bridge re-name.
Using ExtendScript Toolkit or a Plain text editor copy the code into either and save it out as Filename.jsx
This needs to be saved into the correct folder. this is found by going to the preferences in Bridge, selecting Startup Scripts, this will open the folder where the script is to be saved.
Once this is done close and re-start Bridge.
To Use: Goto the Tools Menu and select Rename PDFs
Make sure you test the code with a few copied files into a seperate folder first to make sure it does what you want.
The script will do all PDF files in the selected folder.
#target bridge 
if( BridgeTalk.appName == "bridge" ) { 
renamePDFs = MenuElement.create("command", "Rename PDFs", "at the end of Tools");
renamePDFs.onSelect = function () {
app.document.deselectAll();
var thumbs = app.document.getSelection("pdf");
for( var z in thumbs){
var Name = decodeURI(thumbs[z].spec.name);
var parts = Name.toLowerCase().replace(/\s/g,'-').match(/(.*)(-)(.*)(-)(.*)(\.pdf)/);
var NewName = parts[1].replace(/^[a-z]/, function(s){ return s.toUpperCase() });
NewName += parts[2]+parts[3]+parts[4]+parts[5].toUpperCase().replace(/[A-Z]$/, function(s){ return s.toLowerCase() });
NewName += parts[6];
thumbs[z].spec.rename(NewName);