Use Filenames that Sort Properly

Along those same lines... I create a weekly bulletin. If you name it "Jan 2 2024" or "1-2-24 bulletin," In these cases April will come before January, or January will be followed by October, November, and December, before February (1, 10, 11, 12, 2).

I use the yymmdd format (240102 bulletin) which makes it very easy to sort by date.

Kathy R.

Thanks, Steve Wells, for sharing your findings. Who knew that Name 1.txt would sort before Name.txt?

Allen, thanks for your brilliant tip on using "decade numbering" (10, 20, ... 90) to accommodate unplanned insertions (10, 11, 12, 20, 30...).

I wanted to mention a few details about the way Microsoft Windows sorts filenames and some ways to place names so they appear after alphabetic names. I discovered many interesting details that were not readily available on the internet, even with some searching. The following is my resulting "treatise," but I can't seem to type tabs here, so sorry if things don't line up well.

Character names below use terminology of the Character Map applet. Colloquial terms may follow. I've thrown in a bunch of Unicode characters that might make visually appealing prefix characters.

The following keyboard characters cannot be used in file names
\ U+005C Reverse Solidus (Backslash)
/ U+002E Solidus (Forward Slash)
: U+003A Colon
* U+002A Asterisk
? U+003F Question Mark
< U+003C Less-Than Sign
> U+003E Greater-Than Sign
| U+007C Vertical Line
" U+0022 Quotation Mark

Non-alphanumeric characters in sorting order. Keyboard characters are marked (kbd).
! U+0021 Exclamation Mark (kbd)
# U+0023 Number Sign (kbd)
$ U+0024 Dollar Sign (kbd)
% U+0025 Percent Sign (kbd)
& U+0026 Ampersand (kbd)
( U+0028 Left Parenthesis (kbd)
) U+0029 Right Parenthesis (kbd)
, U+002C Comma (kbd)
. U+002E Full Stop Period (kbd)
; U+003B Semicolon (kbd)
@ U+0040 Commercial At At Sign (kbd)
[ U+005B Left Square Bracket (Left Bracket) (kbd)
] U+005D Right Square Bracket (Right Bracket) (kbd)
^ U+005E Circumflex Accent (Circumflex) (kbd)
_ U+005F Low Line (Underscore) (kbd)
` U+0060 Grave Accent (Back Accent) (kbd)
{ U+007B Left Curly Bracket (Left Brace) (kbd)
} U+007D Right Curly Bracket (Right Brace) (kbd)
~ U+007E Tilde (kbd)
´ U+00B4 Acute Accent
‖ U+2016 Double Vertical Line
‽ U+203D Interrobang
+ U+002B Plus Sign (kbd)
⁄ U+2024 Fraction Slash
∕ U+2215 Division Slash
= U+003D Equals Sign (Equal Sign) (kbd)
± U+00B1 Plus-Minus Sign
× U+00D7 Multiplication Sign
÷ U+00F7 Division Sign
§ U+00A7 Section Sign
† U+2020 Dagger
‡ U+2021 Double Dagger
• U+2022 Bullet
[Numbers in this order: 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9] (kbd)
[Letters Case is preserved but not differentiated.] (kbd)
[Certain Unicode characters]

Notes
Spaces are not allowed as the first character of a filename, but are allowed when placed directly into other parts of a filename, including the end.
U+0020 Space
U+00A0 No-Break Space

Prefaces The following four characters, when preceding a space, sort before all others while following the order below. When preceding any other character, they sort with that character, but preceding the character itself.
' U+0027 Apostrophe (kbd)
­- U+00AD Soft Hyphen
- U+002D Hyphen-Minus (kbd)
‐ U+2010 Hyphen (Unicode 2010)

After Z It may be desirable to create filenames, especially prefix characters, that sort after all alphabetic characters. Several of the following Unicode characters look presentable in a prefix arrangement.
ο U+03BF Greek Small Letter omicron
о U+043E Cyrillic Small Letter O
꞉ U+A789 Modifier Letter Colon
꞊ U+A78A Modifier Letter Short Equals Sign
Example Yak
Zebra
ο Funny Pictures

Base+Suffix Filenames with a spaced suffix sort preceding the simpler base filename. Unspaced suffix filenames sort following the simpler base filename. See the following example. Thanks for nothing, Microsoft.
Name 1.txt
Name 2.txt
Name.txt
Name1.txt
Name2.txt