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schmidjd's avatar
schmidjd
Explorer | Level 4
2 years ago

Dropbox does not order by name correctly

I sometimes view folders at the Dropbox web site (I am looking at a section that is not synched locally to any other machine).

 

When I try to order the folders by name, I get an unexpected order... see the attached screenshot. I have searched the other entries in this forum and can't find anything that addresses this.

 

Is this the expected behavior? I would have thought that the folders beginning with "1984.." would be listed above any of the folders starting with "20...". The folders that start with "20..." are ordered the way I would expect.

 

Is there some way to change this, so the order is makes more sense (at least to me).

 

  • Hi schmidjd,

    Number ordering impose order by numbers as such (continuous sequence of digit), not order by digit (digit by digit). In this context despite of 2 is bigger than 1, 198411 is bigger than 2022. 🙂

    If 198411 represents year 1984 and month 11, better include some separator (e.g. space or underbar). Instead of 198411, name it 1984_11, for instance.

    Hope this helps.

  • Hi schmidjd,

    Number ordering impose order by numbers as such (continuous sequence of digit), not order by digit (digit by digit). In this context despite of 2 is bigger than 1, 198411 is bigger than 2022. 🙂

    If 198411 represents year 1984 and month 11, better include some separator (e.g. space or underbar). Instead of 198411, name it 1984_11, for instance.

    Hope this helps.

    • schmidjd's avatar
      schmidjd
      Explorer | Level 4
      Ok, that makes sense if it’s ordering by the value of the first contiguous set of numerals and treating it as a number. I thought it would be just a simple alphanumeric sort. I’ll think about updating my naming scheme.

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