Recently I came across a situation where I needed to rename more then 100 mp3 files. For some reason I had to remove first 4 characters from each file name. Rather then renaming each file manually, I thought of writing a small php script that renamed all these files for me.
I would like to share that with you, so here goes the code.

$dir = "F:\\Music\\php_test";
$fileType = "mp3";
$charsToTrim = 4;
if($handle = opendir($dir)) 
{
    $count = 1;
    while (false !== ($file = readdir($handle))) // read files in directory one by one
   {
	if(is_file($dir."\\".$file))
	{
		$extension = substr(strrchr($file,"."),1);// get the extension
		if(strcasecmp($fileType,$extension) == 0)// proceed only if it matches with the extension we have provided
		{
			$newName = substr($file,$charsToTrim); // generate new name for file
			$success = rename($dir."\\".$file, $dir."\\".$newName); // rename the file
			if($success)
			{
				echo $file." renamed to ".$newName;
				echo "
";
				$count++;
			}
			else
			{
				echo "Cannot rename ".$file. " to ".$newName."
";
				echo "
";
			}
		}
	}
   }
	echo $count." files renamed";
}
    closedir($handle);

You will have to set these 3 parameters:
$dir – Location of directory in which files are placed.
$fileType – Extension of files that you want to rename(mp3 or txt or doc any other)
$charsToRemove – How many characters do you wish to remove from the filename.

Set these and you are ready to rename. Remember that this script will only trim characters from start of the file name.
This means if you have set $charsToRemove = 5, a file with name “abcd_Plateau” will be renamed to “Plateau”.

Waiting for comments and suggestions.

For all those unfamiliar with tinyurl, it is a service thats lets you convert long urls into short ones. It is very popular and gets about 1.5 billion hits per month. Use of tinyurl can be seen hugely in applications like twitter. As twitter limits users to enter 140 character messages, long urls are a pain to post. Tinyurl reduces them to 25-30 characters. Then they can be posted easily along with other message.

Although it is not mentioned anywhere on TinyURL site, it has an API using which you can write a utility in PHP to create your own tiny urls.

The API can be found at

http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=

It expects a parameter url which is the URL you wish to convert into tiny url. Return value is the generated tiny url in case of success, error otherwise.

Here is the php code:

$url = "http://vijayjoshi.org";
$tiny = file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=$url");
echo 'Original url : '.$url;
echo '
';
echo '
';
echo 'TinyURL (Click to test) : '.$tiny.'';

In the above case it will output
http://tinyurl.com/cn3c5d

Pretty straightforward. $url contains the url you wish to convert. Then we pass it along with the API url and finally use php function file_get_contents to get the output.

Go ahead and give it a try.

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