Hi Jungle - that is what I expected to happen but I got extra " added when I submitted the string to the dialog.
Your solution does show me where I was 'wrong'.
Normally a <space> needs to have " ", so I added them, giving me the result in the attached jpg.
However had I not manually typed in the string in the ... form, MR would have given me the format you have that works. I didn't expect that format could work given the restraints of the " "s. Assumed it would try a literal " ($1)" as the name string.
Hi AJB - you would be right about the escapes but \ will not enter the equation as a character that the rename form allows for output. (Cannot output a regex from a regex, does that ever work in the ancient mists of Perl?)
I guess you were thinking something like
(?:what|the|hell) ![Smiley :)](http://forum.multicommander.com/forum/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
In the case of the MultiRename dialog you will see the format can be only:- regex
in|acceptable folder-file name
outMR is a very useful tool for renaming, & I use it quite a bit in my MC toy-box.
![Wink ;)](http://forum.multicommander.com/forum/Smileys/default/wink.gif)
So I guess that is panic over!
![Cheesy :D](http://forum.multicommander.com/forum/Smileys/default/cheesy.gif)