Re: [office] Proposal for Spreadsheets: New sort option "natural sort"

[David Faure <faure@kde.org>]

On Friday 02 February 2007, Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg wrote:
> Step 4. In this step, the numeric substring is determined by locating 
> the first occurrence of a non-digit character after the first digit 
> character; the substring from the first digit character through the 
> character preceding the first non-digit is considered the numeric 
> substring. This substring is then converted into a double-precision 
> variable. This step is performed on both of the compared strings, and 
> the converted values are compared by simple numeric comparison. If these 
> values differ, then the result will be returned and the process will 
> end. If they are equal to one another, then the process will proceed to 
> the next step.

Here's a comment by Martin Pool, who implemented "natural sorting" in KDE.

"
If I'm reading this correctly, that means that "1.3" > "1.20", in a
locale where "." is the decimal separator.  In typical software version
strings that's not correct, and that was the case I was originally
trying to handle, and also apparently the case Robert Weir describes.
Obviously sometimes sorting as floats is best but I suggest that when
numbers are intermixed with non-digits the other algorithm is better.
That is, to basically follow this algorithm but just treat the decimal
separator as non-numeric.

Also, conversion to double might give unexpected results if there are
very long runs of digits (barcodes?)  I'm not sure if that is a concern.

Also it seems rather odd that 1.2.3.4 will be sorted as (1.2, 3.4)... 
"

-- 
David Faure, faure@kde.org, sponsored by Trolltech to work on KDE,
Konqueror (http://www.konqueror.org), and KOffice (http://www.koffice.org).