How to change folder names in python?

Question

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.

Answer 1

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))