You are mistaken. While neither guarantee the order of Windows Explorer, they do not produce the order you claim they do.

$ perl -e'
   use feature qw( say );
   use Sort::Naturally qw( nsort );
   say for nsort qw( HC_TalkRoar_1 HC_TalkRoar_1b );
'
HC_TalkRoar_1
HC_TalkRoar_1b
[download]

$ perl -e'
   use feature qw( say );
   use Sort::Key::Natural qw( natsort );
   say for natsort qw( HC_TalkRoar_1 HC_TalkRoar_1b );
'
HC_TalkRoar_1
HC_TalkRoar_1b
[download]

Thank you, you helped me find the issue which was not the sorting. Much appreciated! The issue was because of my file extensions. If you add .wav to the end of those two strings, they sort backwards. Filtering out the file extensions solves it.

use strict; use warnings; 
use File::Find;

  my @finds=('D:/goodies/pdhuck/down1/perl/monks/winsorts'); 

  my @fns=(); 

  my $sub_want_info2 =sub { push @fns,$File::Find::name if -f $File::F
+ind::name; };

  find({wanted=>$sub_want_info2,no_chdir=>1}, @finds);

    use Encode qw/encode decode from_to/;
    ##http://code.activestate.com/lists/activeperl/21182/
    ##https://gist.github.com/whitebell/5692575
    my %fnt; 
    for my $fn (@fns) {$fnt{encode('UTF-16LE', decode('UTF-8', $fn))}=
+$fn;} 

    use Win32::API;

    my $f = Win32::API->new("shlwapi.dll", "StrCmpLogicalW", "PP","I")
+;
    my @fnts=sort { $f->Call($a, $b) } keys %fnt; 
    @fns=(); 
    for my $fntt (@fnts){ push @fns,$fnt{$fntt};} 


    for my $fn (@fns){ print $fn."\n";}
[download]

D:/goodies/pdhuck/down1/perl/monks/winsorts/a1
D:/goodies/pdhuck/down1/perl/monks/winsorts/u2
D:/goodies/pdhuck/down1/perl/monks/winsorts/u100
D:/goodies/pdhuck/down1/perl/monks/winsorts/u200
[download]

Thanks! That solved other issues I was having! Now I just have to figure out what it's doing!!

If you want the file extension to be treated as an independent secondary sorting key, you can use Sort::Key::Maker for creating a multi-key sorting function:

use Sort::Key::Natural;
use Sort::Key::Maker sort_filenames => sub { /^(.*?)((?:\.[^\.]*)?)$/ 
+}, qw(natural natural);

my @filenames = qw(...);

my @sorted = sort_filenames @filenames;
[download]

Thank you!

I found something I don't understand, which is forcing me to use the Win32 call method described above. When trying to do a case-insensitive sort by using {uc $_} or {lc $_}, I get different and unexpected results. Here is an example using the same string sets, one upper case, one not.

   use feature qw( say );
   use Sort::Key::Natural qw( natsort );
   say for natsort qw(     P007B_YUMYUMNOISESANDTASTING1 P007_YUMYUMNO
+ISESANDTASTING5A P007_YUMYUMNOISESANDTASTING5B 007_YUMYUMNOISESANDTAS
+TING5C );
   say for natsort qw( P007b_YumYumNoisesAndTasting1 P007_YumYumNoises
+AndTasting5A P007_YumYumNoisesAndTasting5B P007_YumYumNoisesAndTastin
+g5C );
[download]

Output:

P007B_YUMYUMNOISESANDTASTING1
P007_YUMYUMNOISESANDTASTING5A
P007_YUMYUMNOISESANDTASTING5B
P007_YUMYUMNOISESANDTASTING5C

P007_YumYumNoisesAndTasting5A
P007_YumYumNoisesAndTasting5B
P007_YumYumNoisesAndTasting5C
P007b_YumYumNoisesAndTasting1
[download]

In the first case, the "P007B_" sorts before "P007_". In the second case it sorts after. If I do all lc, it's the same thing, 7b sorts to the beginning instead of the end:

P007b_yumyumnoisesandtasting1
P007_yumyumnoisesandtasting5a
P007_yumyumnoisesandtasting5b
P007_yumyumnoisesandtasting5c
[download]

Anyone understand why? I need it to sort after, but be case insensitive...

Thanks!