Here’s how you can get explorer-like behaviour in Python:
#!/usr/bin/env python
"""
>>> items = u'a1 a003 b2 a2 a10 1 10 20 2 c100'.split()
>>> items.sort(explorer_cmp)
>>> for s in items:
... print s,
1 2 10 20 a1 a2 a003 a10 b2 c100
>>> items.sort(key=natural_key, reverse=True)
>>> for s in items:
... print s,
c100 b2 a10 a003 a2 a1 20 10 2 1
"""
import re
def natural_key(astr):
"""See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001018.html"""
return [int(s) if s.isdigit() else s for s in re.split(r'(\d+)', astr)]
def natural_cmp(a, b):
return cmp(natural_key(a), natural_key(b))
try: # use explorer's comparison function if available
import ctypes
explorer_cmp = ctypes.windll.shlwapi.StrCmpLogicalW
except (ImportError, AttributeError):
# not on Windows or old python version
explorer_cmp = natural_cmp
if __name__ == '__main__':
import doctest; doctest.testmod()
To support Unicode strings, .isdecimal() should be used instead of .isdigit().
.isdigit() may also fail (return value that is not accepted by int()) for a bytestring on Python 2 in some locales e.g., ‘\xb2’ (‘²’) in cp1252 locale on Windows.