Use natural sorting

Support
1

I have the Use natural sorting option enabled, hoping to emulate the numerical sorting default found in Windows 10 File Explorer.

However, when I sort by %_folderpath% the results are not as expected.

e.g. in File Explorer, sorting 3 folders appears as expected:
Help!
Help! (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [2014 US Remaster]
Help! [2009 Remaster]

in MP3Tag the sort order is different:
Help! (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) [2014 US Remaster]
Help! [2009 Remaster]
Help!

I'm not sure if this is a bug. Please can anyone advise further?

2

I think that the natural sorting means that the case of a letter is ignored and certain internal characters like the apostrophe also.
In respect to the folder ... I can only suspect that "Help!" is not just "Help!" but actually "Help!" - and the backslash is further down the character code table than the space character in

Here is an example if you sort by the full path:
sorting
The solo "Notorious" comes after the "Latin Rascal Mix"

3

According to Wikipedia the "natural sort order" is an ordering of strings in alphabetical order, except that multi-digit numbers are treated atomically.

There is no hint about the sort order of special charaters like [ or ] or ( or ) or others

The natural sort order helps to sort strings like

Title1
Title2
Title3
Title11
Title12

more human-friendly.

I don't see any logical reason to prefer a ( before a [

BTW: I found this interesting answer on superuser.com

4

Correct. Backslash at the end of folders is the problem here.

Replacing backslash with $char(32):
e.g. $left(%_folderpath%,$sub($len(%_folderpath%),1))$char(32)
or $regexp(%_folderpath%,^(.+)\x5c$,$1 )

provides the expected sort order, but slows down the sort. Surely, this can be done by the internal code, if the Use natural sort option is enabled?

5

You could use the property "Sort by" in the column definition and sort by a string that got removed all the common path separators:
$replace(%_folderpath%,/,, ,,_,,:,,\,)