Replacing forward slash (/) in a field when renaming files

[ygabuev]

Hi!

I have a bunch of albums where artists are listed as "Artist A / Artist B". When doing beet move, I want the artists to be displayed in the filenames as "Artist A & Artist B". To do that, I put the following snippet in the config:

replace:
    # these two lines differ from the default config
    '[\\]': _
    '[/]': '&'

    '^\.': _
    '[\x00-\x1f]': _
    '[<>:"\?\*\|]': _
    '\.$': _
    '\s+$': ''
    '^\s+': ''
    '^-': _

However, this doesn't work - it still changes the forward slash (/) to an underscore (_). Is it a bug or am I doing somthing wrong? What should I do to replace forward slashes correctly?

[sampsyo]

You’re running into this specific and challenging issue: #323

[ygabuev]

Oh I see. I looked into functemplate.py and that's indeed not that simple. So many edge cases, espicially due to the ability to call functions! Probably easier to use path_sep_replase.

However, there is still no info on it in the documentation. Would you like a small PR with minimal documentation in reference/config.rst?

[sampsyo]

I think that makes sense! One thing that would make sense for the docs is to include a strong warning… I am a tad worried that people could really screw things up on their filesystem by, for example, setting that option to /. 🤷

[ygabuev]

Oh, and also the function util.asciify_path() doesn't seem to actually use sep_replace argument, because we split the path into components on os.sep, so we are left with components that don't have separators in them. The same goes for os.altsep, because we transform it into os.sep as the first step. Am I correct? If yes, I can modify the code and probably add some tests.

[sampsyo]

That does sound right, at least (admittedly) without looking into it too deeply… yes, I'd be happy to read some draft code!

[ygabuev]

Turned out that I was wrong in my previous message, because the separators can appear after decoding the string. So, nothing to change.

Still, added some rudimentery documentation for path_sep_replace in #4119.

[2V3EvG4LMJFdRe]

Similar to this, what do I put in replace to make beets use "..." instead of the single-character "…"? I also want this to account for problematic filenames (do "_.." in the filename), and to work on the tags of the file too (always do "...").