Renaming to Aid with Numerical File Sorts Primer Tutorial
It’s not just the operating systems that throw up issues regarding file names with numerical parts to them that when displayed get sorted alphabetically, but you’d like it either …
- numerically … or …
- a hybrid of numerically and alphabetically
We’re not there yet … but “are we there yet”, now? … but we’re starting down the road to this with some PHP we’re developing. This might be useful as a tool because sometimes with real work, you could be talking about hundreds of files needing renaming either to …
- suit some procedural (process) that is looking for the numbers to determine order, and yet uses defaulting file sorting algorithms … ie. what we are talking about today is a program to make it that both are satisfied, so long as the procedure doesn’t mind filenames being changed this way, to still work
- annoyance factor issues, the one that springs to mind for me being the assembly of some images that we use Mac OS X desktop application Preview to use to assemble into a PDF slideshow via being in the Mac OS X Finder and highlighting our files and running into the alphabetic/numerical sort conundrum … annoyance only? … by that I mean, you can fix this at Preview, so it rates as an “annoyance” only
What’s involved? Lots … think of this in terms of prefixing the correct number of “0”‘s (ie. zeroes) in the right place of the filename …
- the file extension … we decide not to cross across file extensions with our mini-renaming-rule sets
- the number of delimited sets before the period (ie. dot “.”) of the file extension … we decide not to cross across “file extension/number of delimited sets before the period”s with our mini-renaming-rule sets
- the delimiter itself before the period (and if none, call it the period) … we decide not to cross across “file extension/number of delimited sets before the period/delimiter”s with our mini-renaming-rule sets
- how many “delimited sets before the period” to apply the renaming logic attempts onto … we’ve decided just the first for now
- what about non-numerical and non-delimiter characters before the period … hand me the Bex, will you?!
Our first draft of rename_to_aid_sorting.php can be tried, by you, at this live run link.
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