# Sort by Filename Seems to Ignore Case and Strip Hyphens

**URL:** https://community.mp3tag.de/t/sort-by-filename-seems-to-ignore-case-and-strip-hyphens/60541
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [March 30, 2023, 1:23pm UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/sort-by-filename-seems-to-ignore-case-and-strip-hyphens/60541 "2023-03-30T13:23:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 9

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### Author: ![Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/user_avatar/community.mp3tag.de/florian/32/5759_2.png) [@Florian](https://community.mp3tag.de/u/Florian)
#### Post date: [March 31, 2023, 9:24am UTC](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/sort-by-filename-seems-to-ignore-case-and-strip-hyphens/60541/9 "2023-03-31T09:24:17Z")

</div>

This is a speciality of some Windows sorting algorithms, which employ something called _word sort technique_.

In this type of sort, all punctuation marks and other non-alphanumeric characters, except for the hyphen and the apostrophe, come before any alphanumeric character. The hyphen and the apostrophe are treated differently from the other non-alphanumeric characters to ensure that words such as "Boi-Ngo" and "Boingo" stay together in a sorted list.

You can see this live in action by creating a list of folders in Windows Explorer:

- Boi-Ago
- Boi-Ngo
- Boiago
- Boingo

Usually, you'd expect the list of folders sorted like above. But the special _word sort technique_ outlined above produces the following result, which also matches what you've observed in your initial report.

- Boiago
- Boi-Ago
- Boingo
- Boi-Ngo

I can understand why you'd see this type of sorting behavior as a bug, but hope that the additional information reframes it more in the direction of a feature — a feature, which is admittedly not very helpful in your particular case.

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_[View the full topic](https://community.mp3tag.de/t/sort-by-filename-seems-to-ignore-case-and-strip-hyphens/60541)._