A small script to strip characters in filenames that don't fall in the range of 7-bit ASCII codepoints. This script is useful if the filename should be restricted to English (letters+punctuations).

strip2byte.py

#!/bin/python
import glob
from sys import argv
from argparse import ArgumentParser
from os import rename

_parser = ArgumentParser(
    "Strip28Bit",
    description= "Strips multi-byte UNICODE strings in"
                 " filenames into 7-bit ASCII strings",
    allow_abbrev= True
)

strip_non8bit = lambda s: ''.join(filter(lambda c: ord(c) < 128, str(s)))

_parser.add_argument(
    "-r", type= bool,
    default= False,
    help= "Recursively searches through nested folders",
    dest= "isRecursive"
)

_parser.add_argument(
    "pattern", type=str
)

_args = _parser.parse_args()


files = glob.glob(_args.pattern, recursive=_args.isRecursive)
if len(files) == 0:
    print("No files found by the expression provided.")

# Do the actual process of stripping unicode chars that doesn't
# fit into the 7-bit integer (max=127) ASCII range.
for file in files:
    rename(file, strip_non8bit(file))