Natural sort

[freefly42]

I use this for giving access to build distributions hosted in private S3 buckets, and find that alphanumeric sorting results in confusion over what the "latest" build is. So I added a natural sort function that I call on the directories and the folders so that "99.txt" will appear before "100.txt". Actually, in my implementation I now reverse sort the numbers so that the highest build number will always be at the top of the list, but the text portions are sorted alphabetically:

function naturalSort(a, b) {
  // Extract strings and numbers from filenames
  var regex = /(\D+)|(\d+)/g;
  var aParts = a.Key.match(regex);
  var bParts = b.Key.match(regex);

  // Compare corresponding parts of the filenames
  while (aParts && bParts && aParts.length > 0 && bParts.length > 0) {
    var aPart = aParts.shift();
    var bPart = bParts.shift();
    if (aPart !== bPart) {
      var aNum = parseInt(aPart, 10);
      var bNum = parseInt(bPart, 10);
      if (isNaN(aNum) || isNaN(bNum)) {
        // Sort by string part
        return aPart.localeCompare(bPart);
      } else {
        // Sort by numerical part
        if (aNum !== bNum) {
          return bNum - aNum;
        }
      }
    }
  }

  // If filenames have different numbers of parts, sort by length
  return aParts.length - bParts.length;
}

It works by splitting the names by "decimal" vs "not-decimal" segments, and if a corresponding segment of both names is numeric it Performas a numerical sorting, if either is non-numeric than alphabetical sorting is used. The result is that natural number sorting will occur regardless of where in the file/directory name the number appears. Since this is done in the browser I don't care much that it's less efficient than other sorting mechanisms, it produces highly desirable results.

[rufuspollock]

@freefly42 thanks for sharing. Are you suggesting this going into core? that would be welcome though we'd need a PR 😄