5/31/2021

Windows 10 Explorer Weird Sorting

I accidentally came across this weird sorting behavior. Look at the following list of files, sorted by Name:

Is Windows trying a mixture of alphanumeric and numeric sorting?

If you compare the first group of files with the last one, it does not look like a numeric interpretation, as in the last group, the number is prefixed by "a".

The second group is most interesting: 0101 comes after 02, but 01x01 comes before. How strange is that?

Am I overlooking something? I started thinking I was wrong and even verified my own understanding of sorting using Excel. Am I going nuts?

Well, not quite: apparently Explorer does interpret sequences of digits a numbers. No other OS does that! Hell, not even the command prompt does:


I will just use the additional separator (as in 01x01) for now to make sure that my files get sorted appropriately. i. e. the way I need it.

But I would really appreciate MS to fix this. At least the sort behavior should be consistent within a single OS. Preferably in line with all the others ;-)

And thanks a lot to MS for having me doubt myself for quite a while.

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