Distribution: Kubuntu 10.10
KDE version: 4.5.5

Hi.

I am wondering if someone can educate me on "natural sorting" in Dolphin. It is turned on by default, with which my three files are listed as below.

Code: Select all

pf_bus_2011010203.pdf
receipts_20110405.jpeg
receipts_2011010203.jpeg


My question is, how is it "natural" when "receipts_20110405.jpeg" is listed before "receipts_2011010203.jpeg"? Of course, turning natural sorting off will correctly reverse the order of those two files, but even with natural sorting on, I would expect "receipts_2011010203.jpeg" to be listed before "receipts_20110405.jpeg." Can someone enlighten me on that?

Thanks...

from the handbook http://docs.kde.org/stable/en/kdebase-a ... lphin.html

Natural sorting of items controls how items are sorted in the view. If this option is enabled, the sort order of three example files will be:
File1,
File2,
File10.

If this option is disabled, the normal alphabetical sorting will be used, which leads to the sort order:
File1,
File10,
File2.

my reading of it is that Dolphin looks at the numbers after "receipts_" and compares their numerical values and as 2011010203 is > 20110405 it is placed last in the sort order

google is right. Natural sorting, pretty much by definition, treats a series of numerical characters as a single multi-digit number.

So for normal sorting, 100 is treated as a series of three characters, 1, then 0, then 0. For natural sorting, it is treated as a single number, "100".

So when you compare 20 to 100 the standard way, it compares the first characters 1 and 2, and decides the character 2 is larger. That is all it needs to make a decision. With natural sorting, it compares the numbers 20 and 100 and decides the number 100 is larger.

You could think of it as though the number was being treated as a single character with a very large value.

Aah, I got it. Thanks guys. Since I named those files after the year and month(s) they were related to, it never occurred to me that "2011010203" could be considered a whole number.

With all that in mind, I believe turning natural sorting off will be the better option for me. strcmp() all the way.

If you put dashes in (or some other character) it will sort properly.

So for instance:

pf_bus_2011-01-02-03.pdf
receipts_2011-04-05.jpeg
receipts_2011-01-02-03.jpeg