Natural sorting

I have some files that need to be sorted by name, unfortunately I can’t use a regular sort, because I also want to sort the numbers in the string, so I did some research and found that what I am looking for is called natural sorting.

I tried the solution given here and it worked perfectly.

However, for strings like PresserInc-1_10.jpg and PresserInc-1_11.jpg which causes that specific natural key algorithm to fail, because it only matches the first integer which in this case would be 1 and 1, and so it throws off the sorting. So what I think might help is to match all numbers in the string and group them together, so if I have PresserInc-1_11.jpg the algorithm should give me 111 back, so my question is, is this possible ?

Here’s a list of filenames:

files = ['PresserInc-1.jpg', 'PresserInc-1_10.jpg', 'PresserInc-1_11.jpg', 'PresserInc-10.jpg', 'PresserInc-2.jpg', 'PresserInc-3.jpg', 'PresserInc-4.jpg', 'PresserInc-5.jpg', 'PresserInc-6.jpg', 'PresserInc-11.jpg']

Answers:

Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.

Method 1

Google: Python natural sorting.

Result 1: The page you linked to.

But don’t stop there!

Result 2: Jeff Atwood’s blog that explains how to do it properly.

Result 3: An answer I posted based on Jeff Atwood’s blog.

Here’s the code from that answer:

import re

def natural_sort(l): 
    convert = lambda text: int(text) if text.isdigit() else text.lower() 
    alphanum_key = lambda key: [convert(c) for c in re.split('([0-9]+)', key)] 
    return sorted(l, key=alphanum_key)

Results for your data:

PresserInc-1.jpg
PresserInc-1_10.jpg
PresserInc-1_11.jpg
PresserInc-2.jpg
PresserInc-3.jpg
etc...

See it working online: ideone

Method 2

If you don’t mind third party libraries, you can use natsort to achieve this.

>>> import natsort
>>> files = ['PresserInc-1.jpg', 'PresserInc-1_10.jpg', 'PresserInc-1_11.jpg', 'PresserInc-10.jpg', 'PresserInc-2.jpg', 'PresserInc-3.jpg', 'PresserInc-4.jpg', 'PresserInc-5.jpg', 'PresserInc-6.jpg', 'PresserInc-11.jpg']
>>> natsort.natsorted(files)
['PresserInc-1.jpg',
 'PresserInc-1_10.jpg',
 'PresserInc-1_11.jpg',
 'PresserInc-2.jpg',
 'PresserInc-3.jpg',
 'PresserInc-4.jpg',
 'PresserInc-5.jpg',
 'PresserInc-6.jpg',
 'PresserInc-10.jpg',
 'PresserInc-11.jpg']

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0