TLDR Web Dev · OPINIONS & ADVICE

WHEN I SAY "ALPHABETICAL ORDER", I MEAN "ALPHABETICAL ORDER"

sebastiano.tronto.net5 min read

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

The author and his dad took photos on a hike, and the author expected them to sort correctly by date when alphabetically ordered. However, he found that graphical file managers (Windows, Google Drive, KDE Dolphin, Gnome) sorted the files incorrectly, with his photos consistently appearing before his dad's. The problem was that his phone included an underscore to separate milliseconds, but his dad's didn't, causing the file managers to treat the milliseconds part of the filename as a large numerical value and mis-sort the files.