Example of how to use smart naming rules to remove unwanted characters from a file name

[Jack Smith]

tl;dr For my example, scroll down to bolded large text near bottom.

The complete absence of documentation regarding the Smart Naming feature is very frustrating. 

After having spent more time than I would have liked to searching this forum for a solution to my question of "How to remove unwanted characters (i.e. replace with an empty character) using the smart naming rules" I wanted to provide my current solution so that others don't have to spend several hours looking for a basic solution like I did.

Example video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z5NoQg8LdDk

Say that I want to download this video. I highlight the video's title which I intend to use as the video's name, right click and navigate to the VHD context menu, and open up the smart naming rules so that I am given an XPath expression for VDH to look for and use as the smart name. Now check the Advanced box.

Once you have enabled the advanced option, the xpath expression I get is:

/html/body/ytd-app/div[1]/ytd-page-manager/ytd-watch-flexy/div[5]/div[1]/div/div[2]/ytd-watch-metadata/div/div[1]/h1/yt-formatted-string

This would result in the file being named:

"Polyphia - Playing God (Official Music Video)" without the quotations.

In order to remove undesired characters from the file name, I used the translate() function within the XPath expression field.

I leave the "Regular Expression" field AS IS.

For example, if I wanted to remove the following example characters from a video's title: - & ! , ( )

The resulting XPath expressions I've used is:

translate(/html/body/ytd-app/div[1]/ytd-page-manager/ytd-watch-flexy/div[5]/div[1]/div/div[2]/ytd-watch-metadata/div/div[1]/h1/yt-formatted-string, '-&,!()', '')

Since youtube XPath expressions can be a bit...excessive... here is a simple version:

translate(VDH_Given_XPath_Expression, '-&,!()', '') 

This will replace any of the characters -*,!() in a file name with an empty character.

The VDH Given XPath expression we want to have an effect on is going to be the first value within the parentheses followed by a comma. 

The second portion of the translate function enclosed with apostrophes are the characters I'd like to remove from any file names. In this example, any of these characters: -&,!()

The last portion of the translate function is a double apostrophe (NOT quotation marks) (e.g. '') to represent the empty character I'd like to replace -&,!() with.

The file name began as:

Polyphia - Playing God (Official Music Video)

The file name result after the translate function:

Polyphia  Playing God Official Music Video

(I would lastly use Bulk Rename Utility from TGRMN software (not an ad, just my preferred tool) to replace double spaces with a single space and have much cleaner looking file names on my computer in the end.)

Hopefully this helps any curious person who lacks knowledge of XPath expressions in the future.

[Jack Smith]

If anyone has a solution which is more simple or one which also replaces the double space with a single space WITHOUT having to use an external application afterwards, feel free to let me know. :)