The behaviour described below occurs on Windows-7 systems and on Windows XP. We operate in a dual-language environment – English and Hebrew.
When in Windows Explorer we sort files by name, the order in which they are listed is not what we would expect. Here is a list of file names as sorted by Windows Explorer (all of the files have a .pdf suffix):
1G110033H-PP 19C050G-PP-ORB 19C050H-PPRM 19C100H-PPRM 19C-MBPS-PP 19C-MBPS-PP-1 29AAC050-PP 29AAC100-PP 29AAC100-PPUL 29B004064-PP 101AC050-PP 101AC100-PP 101B100-PPE 1091003G-PPFSUL 10108033G-PPSA 10125033H-PPM
It looks to me that first the items are sorted according to the position of the first alphabetic character in the name, and then, within those groups, they are sorted in "normal" alpha-numeric order.
That is, all the files with an alpha character in the first position are on top of the list, followed by those with the first alpha character in the second position, followed by those with the first alpha character in the third position, and so on.
An alternate way of looking at this is that, in a file name composed of numbers and letters, the sort treats the first group of numbers in the name as the major sort node, with the rest of the name being the secondary sort node.
Now that I understand the sequencing logic, it's not a big problem, but I was wondering why this happens?
Best Answer
By default, the newer sort order considers strings in file and folder names as numeric content, not text. Numerals in folder and file names are sorted according to their numeric value.
In the following example, note how the following files, whose names contain numerals, are sorted.
Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003
In this example,
88is a numerically higher value than5. Therefore, the88.txtis listed after the 5.txt when you sort the folders by name in ascending order.Source: The sort order for files and folders whose names contain numerals is different in Windows Vista, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003 than it is in Windows 2000