File list box doesn't sort items correctly

[ldicker83]

Seems the search function is case sensitive, counting upper case characters ahead of lowercase:

The only change between the above two images is I renamed 'researchtest' to 'Researchtest'

Correct behavior should sort alphanumerically without regard to case.

[ldicker83]

For additional reference, this is the correct sort in the Windows 10 file explorer

[DanRStevens]

Internally the Filesystem code relies on std::filesystem::directory_iterator:
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/filesystem/directory_iterator

The iteration order is unspecified, except that each directory entry is visited only once.

Many filesystems will store file info in sorted order, since there may be some lookup and update benefits to doing so. It's best not to rely on an assumption of filenames being already sorted, since there is no guarantee of it.

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As for std::sort, you can specify a lambda as an optional third argument for the comparator:
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/algorithm/sort

That can allow you do to a case insensitive sort.

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The closest standard library function for string compare is strcmp:
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/strcmp

It seems stricmp (case insensitive string compare) is not part of the C++ standard, so is not supported by all compilers. Further, the meaning of case insensitive compare can be a bit ambiguous, depending on the language (think accented characters), or just not apply to languages that have no sense of case.

There are a few suggestions for writing string insensitive compare on Stack Overflow:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11635/case-insensitive-string-comparison-in-c

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Of course, another option is to simply define the sort order as case sensitive. The way Windows does it is not necessarily "correct", just familiar. I think we would be perfectly justified if we wanted to impose a case sensitive sort here.

With that said, even on Linux, the file explorer and terminal listings show names sorted in a case insensitive manner.