algorithm - Windows Explorer sort method

Question

I'm looking for an algorithm that sorts strings similar to the way files (and folders) are sorted in Windows Explorer. It seems that numeric values in strings are taken into account when sorted which results in something like

name 1, name 2, name 10

instead of

name 1, name 10, name 2

which you get with a regular string comparison.

I was about to start writing this myself but wanted to check if anyone had done this before and was willing to share some code or insights. The way I would approach this would be to add leading zeros to the numeric values in the name before comparing them. This would result in something like

name 00001, name 00010, name 00002

which when sorted with a regular string sort would give me the correct result.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

It's called "natural sort order". Jeff had a pretty extensive blog entry on it a while ago, which describes the difficulties you might overlook and has links to several implementations.