File Name Cleaner

1. 01Paste the namesOne per line, extensions included. The extension is preserved and handled separately from the name.
2. 02Choose a separator and optionsHyphen or underscore, lowercase Latin letters, strip accents, and optionally transliterate Hebrew.
3. 03Copy the clean listEach row shows the original, the clean version, and whether it changed at all.

• Files that will be uploaded to a websiteSpaces and non-Latin characters get percent-encoded in URLs, which turns a readable name into an unreadable one.
• Batch-renaming before an importMany systems reject or mangle names containing spaces, quotes, slashes or emoji. Cleaning first avoids the failed import.
• Making a scanned-document folder navigableScanner output like IMG_20240501 (1).JPG is hard to scan by eye. Consistent separators and casing make a folder readable.

• A typical messy name"Final Report (2).PDF" with hyphen, lowercase and accent-stripping becomes "final-report-2.pdf". The extension is kept and lowercased with the rest.
• Prefix, suffix and lengthA prefix groups a batch, a suffix is inserted before the extension rather than after it, and a maximum length truncates the name without ever cutting into the extension.

• Hyphens for the web, underscores for codeHyphens are the usual convention in URLs. Underscores are safer in contexts where a hyphen could be read as an operator.
• Check the status columnIt tells you which names were already fine, which is useful when you only need to fix part of a batch.

Several different systems each object to different things, which is why a name that works in one place fails in another. Spaces become %20 in URLs. Slashes are path separators and cannot appear in a name at all. Colons are reserved on some systems and fine on others. Quotes, asterisks, question marks and angle brackets are rejected by Windows. Accented and non-Latin characters survive on modern systems but are frequently mangled by older upload pipelines and by software that assumes a single-byte encoding. Cleaning to lowercase Latin letters, digits and a single separator produces a name that survives all of them, which is the point.

The extension is separated from the name before cleaning and re-attached afterwards, so it is never transformed into part of the name, never duplicated, and never truncated by a maximum-length setting. A suffix is inserted between the name and the extension rather than after it, because a suffix appended after ".pdf" would stop the file being recognised as a PDF at all.

This tool produces a list of proposed names and nothing more. It has no access to your file system, does not upload anything and does not read file contents — it only ever sees the text you paste. Renaming the actual files remains a manual step in your operating system or a script you run yourself. It also makes no promise about search rankings, and cannot guarantee that every operating system will accept every result, since the rules genuinely differ between them.

Does this rename my files?

No. It suggests clean names for you to apply yourself. It has no access to your file system and uploads nothing.

Why replace spaces in file names?

Spaces become %20 in URLs and need quoting on a command line. A hyphen or underscore avoids both problems and stays readable.

What happens to the file extension?

It is kept. The name is cleaned separately and the extension re-attached, so a maximum length never truncates it and a suffix goes before it.

Are non-Latin characters removed?

Accents are stripped. Hebrew is preserved as-is unless you turn on transliteration, which converts it to Latin letters.

Is anything uploaded?

No. Only the text you paste is processed, and it stays in your browser.