we dont know how your data look like:

But you can use re.sub:

import re
your_string = re.sub(r'[\\/*?:"<>|]',"","your_string")

You can look at the Django framework (but take their licence into account!) for how they create a "slug" from arbitrary text. A slug is URL- and filename- friendly.

The Django text utils define a function, slugify(), that's probably the gold standard for this kind of thing. Essentially, their code is the following.

import unicodedata
import re

def slugify(value, allow_unicode=False):
    """
    Taken from https://github.com/django/django/blob/master/django/utils/text.py
    Convert to ASCII if 'allow_unicode' is False. Convert spaces or repeated
    dashes to single dashes. Remove characters that aren't alphanumerics,
    underscores, or hyphens. Convert to lowercase. Also strip leading and
    trailing whitespace, dashes, and underscores.
    """
    value = str(value)
    if allow_unicode:
        value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKC', value)
    else:
        value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', value).encode('ascii', 'ignore').decode('ascii')
    value = re.sub(r'[^\w\s-]', '', value.lower())
    return re.sub(r'[-\s]+', '-', value).strip('-_')

And the older version:

def slugify(value):
    """
    Normalizes string, converts to lowercase, removes non-alpha characters,
    and converts spaces to hyphens.
    """
    import unicodedata
    value = unicodedata.normalize('NFKD', value).encode('ascii', 'ignore')
    value = unicode(re.sub('[^\w\s-]', '', value).strip().lower())
    value = unicode(re.sub('[-\s]+', '-', value))
    # ...
    return value

There's more, but I left it out, since it doesn't address slugification, but escaping.

import os
for filename in os.listdir('dirname'):
    os.rename(filename, filename.replace('_intsect_d', ''))

Using os.walk is a reasonable approach.

You'll need to refine your specifications somewhat, though:

• Do you want to rename directories and files, or only files? (For instance, given '(' as a character-to-be-removed, what do you do with the path 'this(/that'? The file name is fine, but the directory name has one of the bad characters.)

• What do you do if renaming a file (or directory) would result in a collision? For instance, suppose you find a file named 'this(' but there is already a file named 'this' (no parenthesis)?

Aside from both of these issues, the method Hackaholic just posted looks good.

If you have a specific set of characters that you want to keep, tr works very well.

For example

tr -cd 'A-Za-z0-9_-'

Will remove any characters not in the set of characters listed. (The -d means delete, and the -c means the complement of the characters listed: in other words, any character not listed gets deleted.)

I think the safest approach here is to just replace any suspicious characters. So, I think you can just replace (or get rid of) anything that isn't alphanumeric, -, _, a space, or a period. And here's how you do that:

import re
re.sub(r'[^\w_. -]', '_', filename)

The above escapes every character that's not a letter, '_', '-', '.' or space with an '_'. So, if you're looking at an entire path, you'll want to throw os.sep in the list of approved characters as well.

Here's some sample output:

In [27]: re.sub(r'[^\w\-_\. ]', '_', r'some\*-file._n\\ame')
Out[27]: 'some__-file._n__ame'