On May 29, 4:35 am, Montrose guy
<Montrose...@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote:

I had a try here with -z +z +1z -1z +2z etc. Try it. Get's kinda
strange. I don't know if it's any good to you, though, Montrose guy.
Good luck.
Glasgow guy. :-)

It completely depends on your locale settings. Windows' sorting system is
rather retarded made to say the least. If you change your locale settings
it completely changes how it sort things. The rules are completely
different for each locale, and especially with non-english characters it
gets really annoying because the sort rules aren't even correct for many
regions. Mixing folders with names from multiple languages, this becomes
extremely annoying and can make it nearly impossible to find anything
because nothing is ever where it should logically be.

For instance, in Danish ÆØÅ are the last 3 letters of the alphabet. aa is
pronounced like å, but it is still indexed like 2 As in modern Danish (in
old rules, before 1985, AA was considered the same as Å). Yet in Windows,
AA gets indexed the same as Å, making it a huge mess and nearly impossible
to find anything with double As. That's when the machine is set to Danish
locale. Switch it to an English locale (such as England, or USA), all of a
sudden folders starting with Æ are indexed as AE (which is partly correct
because Æ is AE ligature, but it's wrong because Æ doesn't exist in the
English alphabet and as such it should be treated as it is in its native
alphabet), Ø gets indexed as an accented O (you get used at that), and Å
becomes indexed as accented A.

Windows doesn't even index accented characters right. It puts them before
the non-accented versions, which is wrong, they're supposed to be AFTER.
Windows also look for worded numbers, so if you have a folder that starts
with One, it will be indexed as 1, and not the alphabetical letters it
should. Same with two, three, and so forth. Considering many times names
with such words are actually titles, this means it again indexes them
wrong.

All other systems follow very similar sorting rules, where only certain
special characters (non-alphabetic) gets sorted slightly different. But
Windows' method is locale dependent, and because the rules aren't all in
tune with the ones actually in use in that locale, sorting anything can
become a nightmare in itself.

That said, there's a specific DLL in your system32 folder that does the
actual sorting (the name elude me atm sorry). If you're handy with C++ and
MFC you can modify it and build your own custom sorting system.

I'm Danish, I live in Canada. I speak several languages. I work with data
gathering, organization, analysis, and sorting massive amounts of data of
many sorts, from many sources. Windows' way of sorting things can become an
extreme reason of frustration when you have data in hundreds of thousands
of folders and trying to find just one. Its search function isn't reliable
enough to find it for you, because it has trouble finding anything when
there's a lot of items in a folder.