Rockbox Technical Forums

Support and General Use => Audio Playback, Database and Playlists => Topic started by: tidy_prophet on December 22, 2007, 11:28:01 AM

Title: Ignore "the" in alphabetical files list
Post by: tidy_prophet on December 22, 2007, 11:28:01 AM
Sorry if this has been asked before, I did a quick search but didn't find anything

I've got file and directory view set to alphabetical, however it lists folders starting with "The" in between S and U. I was wondering if there was any way to get it to ignore the "The" at the start of folders when determining alphabetical order.

Thanks
Title: Re: Ignore "the" in alphabetical files list
Post by: Llorean on December 22, 2007, 11:40:53 AM
No, there's not. The patch for this was even rejected. An alphabetical list of files is exactly that, a list of files in strictly alphabetical order.

There is a patch for using sort tags, for the database, that is being considered but needs to be completed.
Title: Re: Ignore "the" in alphabetical files list
Post by: PaulPosition on December 22, 2007, 02:02:06 PM
(as an addendum : the reason the patch was rejected was, at least in good parts, because no one wants to make rockbox totally anglo-centric. Ignore "the" ?  What about ignore Le, La, Les, Il, El, Los, ... ??)
Title: Re: Ignore "the" in alphabetical files list
Post by: tidy_prophet on December 22, 2007, 10:34:21 PM
Well I imagine there would be no need to ignore "Le" if the language were set to English...(unless the band was Italian or something, but even then...I don't think anyone is getting offended)

Well it's not a huge deal anyway, I guess I could rename the folders "xxxxxx, The" to fix it.

Thanks for the help and quick responses, I'm really liking Rockbox so far
Title: Re: Ignore "the" in alphabetical files list
Post by: saratoga on December 23, 2007, 02:15:11 PM
Well I imagine there would be no need to ignore "Le" if the language were set to English...(unless the band was Italian or something, but even then...I don't think anyone is getting offended)

Submit a patch that does this cleanly and it will be considered.
Title: Re: Ignore "the" in alphabetical files list
Post by: Llorean on December 23, 2007, 05:04:13 PM
Not really likely. What should be ignored really needs to be considered on a song-by-song (or tag by tag) basis, rather than a "What is the display language" because you can have songs titled in a variety of languages.

So the "Sort tags" solution is much more flexible, since it allows ignoring articles on a per-string basis rather than having a "here's our best guess" list of articles which could ignore things it shouldn't, or not ignore things it should, due to incompleteness or conflicts across languages.
Title: Add configuration option for words to be ignored when sorting
Post by: asdfasdf on March 09, 2011, 10:07:46 AM
Sorry to re-activate this old thread, I think this is an interesting feature request. But of course, simply ignoring "the" would be more of a hack.

Squeezebox server lets the user define a list of words to be ignored when sorting, so one can take care of i18n oneself, where needed.
It would also be the user's decision whether ambigious words like "Die" should be ignored or not. (e.g. "Die Ärzte" vs. "Die Happy")

In an ideal world, there would probably an additional ignore-exceptions list, for seldom cases like these to override ignorance. A user's configuration might look like this:

Ignore: the, a, le, la, les, il, li, der, die, das
Except: die happy, die young

I think this solution is useful and straighforward.

Best regards and thank you very much for this great piece of software :)