Sort filenames naturally with Qt

Question

I am reading a directories content using QDir::entryList(). The filenames within are structured like this:

index_randomNumber.png

Answer 1

If you want to use QCollator to sort entries from the list of entries returned by QDir::entryList, you can sort the result with std::sort():

dir.setFilter(QDir::Files | QDir::NoSymLinks);
dir.setSorting(QDir::NoSort);  // will sort manually with std::sort

auto entryList = dir.entryList();

QCollator collator;
collator.setNumericMode(true);

std::sort(
    entryList.begin(),
    entryList.end(),
    [&collator](const QString &file1, const QString &file2)
    {
        return collator.compare(file1, file2) < 0;
    });

---

According to The Badger's comment, QCollator can also be used directly as an argument to std::sort, replacing the lambda, so the call to std::sort becomes:

std::sort(entryList.begin(), entryList.end(), collator);