File Viewing Order ???

[DonSC]

I'm looking for the option/switch/setting that will cause the
viewer to move from one picture to the next in the directory
no matter what the name. I've tried NOSORT but that
didn't have any effect.

In this sample list of file names below (sorted by WIN2000),
the Viewer skips over the 2nd one.
I believe it is because of the "-" character, but there are other places
where it skips files. How can I tell it to display the next file in the directory
regardless of file name?

!ACMa311.jpg
0-981228.jpg
0000YOB 13.jpg
0000%A100000.jpg

[Mij]

Do you really know what order your files are in?
Try opening Files >search files and search for *.* in your folder. That will show you the order in which Windows passes the file names to Irfanview.

[DonSC]

OK... that does show a different order... the same order that
IrfanView uses. So the real question is
how do I get Win XP to display files in the folder in the same order
that IrfanView uses? OR IrfanView to use the same order that
XP displays in the folder? Is that possible?

[DonSC]

I did an experiment comparing the File Search *.* with the
directory-name sort. They are different... a quirk I suppose of
Windows. The *.* sort is (would have been) on the left and the name sort on the
right in the attached screen shot.

Is there a way to cause Irfanview to use and display in the
order on the right -- the directory-name sort order?

NOTE: I wanted to attach a screen shot in gif format but when I tried
to upload it, I got the following error message:

Fatal error:

* Could not create file system directory to hold your attachment.

Unable to proceed with save while $errors array is not empty in class vB_DataManager_AttachmentFiledata in [path]/includes/class_dm.php on line 849

[Mij]

This is quite a complicated issue. Irfanview's sort order, as I presume you already know, is set from Options > Sort Directory files. Ascending XP style is similar to the order in which XP sorts files by default in that letters and numbers are treated separately so that for example "Item2" comes before "Item10", whereas in Win2000 "Item10" would appear before "Item2". However where you have punctuation marks ( such as your ! and - ) or diacritics in the filename, Irfanview often produces a different sort order to XP. XP uses a key held in the Registry to determine the precise sort order. That key will depend on the locale set for the computer, so that the sort order can be varied to take account of different language requirements.
So the short answer is that they will never be exactly the same in all cases.

[DonSC]

Thanks for the explanation.

I wonder if someone couldn't/hasn't made
a plug-in that would force Irfanview to use the XP directory order. Or maybe
Irfanview could have an option similar to FreePhotoViewer that shows
filenames in one pane and the photo of the highlighted filename in a second pane.
It moves up and down the file list, although that list may not match the XP order.

[impdf]

The sort order is described in this knowledge base article

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/319827/en-us

Beside this there ist an OS function called StrCmpLogicalW().
It's available in XP and later but for Unicode strings only.
So an application has to check for the OS version and to use Unicode.