Re: Sort Order
Re: Sort Order
- Subject: Re: Sort Order
- From: Luther Fuller <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 10 Jan 2008 11:02:22 -0600
On Jan 8, 2008, at 5:45 PM, Christopher Nebel wrote:
On Jan 8, 2008, at 1:05 PM, Luther Fuller wrote:
This isn't causing a problem at the moment, but I curious ...
I have a folder containing number-named folders in OS X 10.4.11.
The Finder visibly sorts these folders in list view in the order ...
{_B,
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,
27,28,29,30,31,A}
Which is alpha-numeric ordering.
I have an AppleScript that gets a list of these folders sorted by
name.
I can clearly see the folders being processed in the order ...
{1,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,2,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,3,30
,31,4,5,6,7,8,9,_B,A}
which is alphabetic ordering.
Is this an over-sight? Or is there a mysterious reason for this?
Is this a latent bug?
Traditional lexicographic ordering (what you call "alphabetic") is
how AppleScript has always worked, so we haven't changed it. (It's
not wrong, but it is a different set of rules than you want.)
However, there was a "considering" attribute added in Tiger that
changes the traditional ordering to consider numeric sequences the
way Finder does. Try enclosing your sort routine in this:
considering numeric strings
...
end
I've just done a little experimenting. It seems that 'considering
numeric strings' is not involved.
The code ...
set itemList to (sort (items of testTarget) as alias list by name)
-- sorts alpha-numerically
always returns an alpha-numerically sorted list. But the code ...
set itemList to (items of testTarget) as alias list -- sorts
alphabetically
returns an alphabetically sorted list. My test script did not use
'considering numeric strings'.
It seems that the default sort order is "alphabetical by name",
while the explicit sort-by-name order is "alpha-numeric".
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