translate() takes exactly one argument (2 given)

Question

I want to write a python program to rename all the files from a folder so that I remove the numbers from file name, for example: chicago65.jpg will be renamed as chicago.jpg.

Below is my code but I am getting error as translate() takes only 1 argument. please help in resolving this

import os
def rename_files():
    file_list=os.listdir(r"C:\Users\manishreddy\Desktop\udacity\Secret Message\prank\prank")
    print(file_list)
    os.chdir(r"C:\Users\manishreddy\Desktop\udacity\Secret Message\prank\prank")
    for file_temp in file_list:
        os.rename(file_temp,file_temp.translate(None,"0123456789"))

rename_files()

Answer 1

You are using the Python 2 str.translate() signature in Python 3. There the method takes only 1 argument, a mapping from codepoints (integers) to a replacement or None to delete that codepoint.

You can create a mapping with the str.maketrans() static method instead:

os.rename(
    file_temp, 
    file_temp.translate(str.maketrans('', '', '0123456789'))
)

Incidentally, that's also how the Python 2 unicode.translate() works.

Answer 2

If all you are looking to accomplish is to do the same thing you were doing in Python 2 in Python 3, here is what I was doing in Python 2.0 to throw away punctuation and numbers:

text = text.translate(None, string.punctuation)
text = text.translate(None, '1234567890')

Here is my Python 3.0 equivalent:

text = text.translate(str.maketrans('','',string.punctuation))
text = text.translate(str.maketrans('','','1234567890'))

Basically it says 'translate nothing to nothing' (first two parameters) and translate any punctuation or numbers to None (i.e. remove them).