Alpha or Numerical sorting ?

[Border]

Well on my T2, at the top, I have the series folders in alpha order followed by the most recent single recording at the top of a long list, so on mine, UP arrow from Media takes me to the oldest single recording. I then have to scroll up to find the most recent. What am I doing wrong?

Is there a definition of "alpha order"

For example consider the following list of folders ( All 0 are zero (i.e. no o for oscar) and all capital letters)

020
1
109
11
A [edit this was supposed to be folder name "A" not "9" as in original post]
0A
13
129

firstly get a piece of paper and arrange how you would view the folders in order.
Then try creating these folders on any system - Windows or HDR.

I tried and the results were different. What am I doing wrong?
As I said all 0's in folder names were numerical (zero) and all A's capitals.

 

[gomezz]

On my old Foxsat HDR I make sure my manual folders are at the top before any dynamic series folders by preceding the folder name with a space. I also use the convention of using all upper case when naming them. I always have FILMS, SAVED and WATCHED plus one or two others on occasion for example combining more than one series of a yet to be watched programme.

One annoying thing that has been happening more recently is many programmes being named as NEW_whatever which clusters their series folder out of their natural alphabetic order.

 

[Black Hole]

Traditionally, an alpha sort takes the ASCII value of the first character in the string as the primary sort, then the second and subsequent characters to resolve "equals" in the primary sort. However, modern operating systems, particularly when displaying a sorted order of folders and file names, bend this a bit by recognising numerical strings so that

1.txt
11.txt
2.txt

gets sorted as

1.txt
2.txt
11.txt

instead of the strict alpha sort in the first example. However, I've never noticed this happen when the string is mixed numbers and letters (etc).

For a pure alpha (ASCII) sort, your list should resolve as:

020
0A
1
109
11
129
13
A

 

[prpr]

For a pure alpha (ASCII) sort, your list should resolve as:

0A
020

I think you'll find that's A about F.

 

[Black Hole]

Oh yes, sorry - post corrected.

 

[af123]

Locale makes a difference on sort orders too, particularly around punctuation. I had a nasty bug to find once where something worked fine on servers in the UK but not in Switzerland and it turned out to be a difference in sort order.