it's so confusing that the order changes when adding IDENTICAL strings to BOTH filenames. Is this really how it's supposed to be?

  • Lysergid@lemmy.ml
    ·
    20 hours ago

    What you expecting called natural sorting. Mac employed natural sorting back in 90s. What you get is legitimate Alphabetical sorting which used by Linux and Windows. Natural sorting parses tokens in the string and compares them. Alphabetical sorting compares two strings by comparing individual characters at same index (position). Alphabetical sorting is quite common as it simpler to implement (or rather harder to screw up) and yields predictable results

    One of many libraries for Python which implements natural sorting https://github.com/SethMMorton/natsort

  • wobfan@lemmy.zip
    ·
    23 hours ago

    i'm not quite sure whether i understood your question but this seems to be right. the 5 from S01E05.*5*.mkv is higher in the alphabet then m from S01E05.*m*kv so it belongs above that entry.

    • mathemachristian [he/him]
      ·
      23 hours ago

      Check the top: apparently "5" < "5.5" but "5 A" > "5.5 A". It's probably because a substring is lexicographically before the string containing it.

      But when comparing 5 A with 5.5 A the second characters ' ' and '.' get compared and apparently '.' < ' '.

      agree on your point though.

      • dysprosium@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        ·
        23 hours ago

        I see, but wouldn't it make more "human readable sense" to order spaces before any other character? Any human working with analog archives would rank 5 A before 5.5 A, since they think 5 is 5.0 in their head

        • mathemachristian [he/him]
          ·
          22 hours ago

          I don't know the exact reasoning for it, I would guess it's because '.' is also used to delimit file types "A book on the.pdf" < "A book on the pdf.pdf" or "Book.pdf" < "Book sequel.pdf"

          I guess your confusion has in part to do with reading digits as numbers, but within a string they are part of an alphabet, every character stands on its own and has no relation to the characters around it. There is no difference between "5 1", "5.1" and "511" you just pick an ordering of the alphabet and then sort each character accordingly.

  • sovietknuckles [they/them]
    ·
    19 hours ago

    What you're looking for is version sort. Here's how ls -1v sorts those files in the terminal, for example:

    Link Click S01E04.mkv
Link Click S01E05.mkv
Link Click S01E05.5.mkv
Link Click S01E06.mkv

    Nemo might be able to support version sort by way of a plugin, but I have not found one. The nnn CLI file manager supposedly supports version sort.