this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
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[–] thesmokingman@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

I’d be curious to see a sorting algorithm that doesn’t handle YYYYY-MM-DD with YYYY-MM-DD properly. If you drop the dashes you still get a proper numeric order. If you sort by component, you still get the proper order. Maybe a string sort wouldn’t? Off the top of my head the languages I’m thinking either put longer strings later, giving us the proper order, or could put 1YYYY- ahead of 1YYY-M so maybe string sorting is the only one that’s out.

[–] HailHydra@infosec.pub 17 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (2 children)

Lexical sorting (string sorting/alphabetical order sorting) is what I believe they were referring to when talking about file names.

The fact that you don't have to do any parsing of the string at all, just do a straight character-by-character alphabetical sort, and they will be sorted by date, is a great benifit of this date scheme. That means in situations where no special parsing is set up (eg, in a File Explorer windows showing a folders contents sorted alphabetically) or where your string isn't strictly date only (eg, a file name format such as '2025-05-02 - Project 3.pdf') you can still have everything sorted by date just by sorting alphabetically.

Its this benifit that is lost when rolling over to 5-digit years.

[–] JackbyDev@programming.dev 2 points 2 days ago

I bet you could make a one liner to rename files with YYYY-MM-DD to 0YYYY-MM-DD fairly easily. Not a problem.

[–] The_Decryptor@aussie.zone 1 points 2 days ago

It's an easy fix at least, just check if you're comparing numbers on both sides and switch to a simple numerical sort.

I think Windows used to get this wrong, but it was fixed so long ago that I'm not even sure now.