new sorting option: ignore articles

[soldier9599]

I am having trouble with this setting (using beta version 14.10.0103). I don't see it in config at all. In XYplorer.ini, I see "SortLeadingWordsToIgnore=a;an;the" but couldn't find "SortIgnoreLeadingWords". I tried adding "SortIgnoreLeadingWords=1" and had no luck, so I got rid of it. I actually looked back at by XYplorer.ini backup from an earlier 14.xx and it did include "SortIgnoreLeadingWords=0" by default. Has this feature been removed?

Here is my config window:

[Marco]

Ignore articles is no longer a global setting, but a per-tab one. See http://www.xyplorer.com/release_14.10.h ... reArticles

[soldier9599]

Oh, I should have noticed that. This is definitely better than a global setting considering you still have the choice to make it default. Thanks for the help.

[DrChiron]

The original topic posting said:

A new sorting option to ignore articles (the, a, an) would be very useful when managing media files like music and movies.

I practically live out of XYp and it IS my media manager.

The evolution of file-name syntax rules has resulted in the usage of various word delimiters/separators. Older files had used underscores before periods (the default file-type delimiter) became commonly used. While gathering media files I have found that a significant number of media titles have periods as word separators. The present "ignore articles in filename sorts" treats periods as part of the word and therefore the article is NOT seen as such. To avoid having to edit (rename) those titles to remove those periods I attempted a remedy by adding a.;an.;the. to the article list XYplorer.ini, but that did not work. I suspect the periods are seen as a delimiter or are otherwise ignored. Am I close to a solution?
Doc

[soldier9599]

The problem is that this setting is looking for entire words. Because periods are not interpreted as a word delimiter by XYplorer, when you have a title such as "The.Movie.Video.avi", it sees that entire filename as a single word rather than seeing any single word "The." (if periods were interpreted as delimiters, it would see the first word as "The" and we wouldn't have this problem in the first place). Unfortunately, the problem you're trying to resolve is also preventing your solution from working. In order for your setting to work you would need to have a filename such as "The. Movie.Video.avi". Also I'm not sure what kind of wildcard support XYplorer has, but even using a wildcard wouldn't circumvent the problem when the entire filename is one word.

My suggestion to you would be to change the filenames. I understand you don't want to go to each file individually and change the names manually, but XYplorer makes automatic name changes very easy. Select all of the files you wish to change and right click, then go to "Rename Special". Here you can do all sorts of changes; I frequently use "space to _" and vice versa. Now when it comes to something unconventional like periods, you need to use "Search and Replace". Simply type the string you would like to replace, then a slash, then the string you want to replace it with. The issue with periods is that your file extension uses a period and you probably don't want to get rid of that, so you can just replace every period with space+period which would change the filename to something like "The .Movie .Video .avi".

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./ .

[admin]

Well, the analysis of soldier9599 is totally correct, but it cost me just one line to make it work as DrChiron wished it to work.

In the next beta this will work as expected:

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SortLeadingWordsToIgnore=a;an;the;a.;an.;the.

I also made it work for underscores. So you can also do this now:

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SortLeadingWordsToIgnore=a;an;the;a.;an.;the.;a_;an_;the_

[DrChiron]

Thank you all ! Will check next BETA.
Danke