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Here is a step-by-step process for replacing special characters with their unaccented counterparts while renaming text files using the first line in Powershell:

  1. Open Powershell and navigate to the directory containing the text files you want to rename.

  2. Use the command Get-ChildItem to retrieve a list of all the text files in the directory. For example: Get-ChildItem *.txt

  3. Use a foreach loop to iterate through each file in the list. For example:

foreach ($file in (Get-ChildItem *.txt)) {
    # rename file
}
  1. Inside the loop, use the command Get-Content to read the contents of the first line of the file. For example:
$firstLine = Get-Content $file -TotalCount 1
  1. Use the .NET Normalize method to convert the accented characters to their unaccented counterparts. For example:
$normalizedLine = [Text.NormalizationForm]::FormD.Normalize($firstLine)
  1. Use the Replace method to replace any remaining special characters with a specified character or string. For example, to replace all non-alphanumeric characters with an underscore:
$cleanLine = $normalizedLine -replace '[^\w\s]', '_'
  1. Use the Rename-Item command to rename the file using the cleaned up first line. For example:
Rename-Item $file.FullName ($cleanLine + '.txt')
  1. The final script should look something like this:
foreach ($file in (Get-ChildItem *.txt)) {
    $firstLine = Get-Content $file -TotalCount 1
    $normalizedLine = [Text.NormalizationForm]::FormD.Normalize($firstLine)
    $cleanLine = $normalizedLine -replace '[^\w\s]', '_'
    Rename-Item $file.FullName ($cleanLine + '.txt')
}