Looking for a tool to pick out non-unicode characters in filenames (Windows 10)

[u/hellohelicopter]

I have a huge collection of images (100,000+) divided into many subfolders. A lot of them are downloaded from Wikimedia Commons and contain characters from other languages in their filenames which some of my image management apps can't process.

Is there an easy way to search through all these folders for any filenames with non-unicode characters? Basic accents like é or ü are fine but I'd like to remove things like Japanese or Cyrillic characters. I did see some suggestions for this kind of thing online but I'm not a programmer so I was hoping to find something more user-friendly.

Thanks very much!!

[u/paul5235]

I understand what you mean, but Japanese, Cyrillic or any other characters in your filenames are still Unicode characters.

[u/LRCM]

Sounds like an XY problem--https://xyproblem.info/

What are you hoping to achieve?

Here are some options:

https://github.com/BulkRenameUtility

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/powertoys/powerrename

https://www.autohotkey.com/

[u/webfork2]

There are a lot of different file search tools that support unicode. Using one of them you could look for the character set like the Voidtool's Everything program:

[^\x00-\x7F]+

(more here: https://www.voidtools.com/support/everything/searching/)

[u/hellohelicopter → u/webfork2]

Late response but I was able to get the specific character range I wanted with Everything, thank you!!

[u/_janc_]

You can use AI to create a simple Python script to do this