Custom sort on "subfield" of filename

Help & Support
1

How can I sort files in a directory by a non-beginning part of the filename field?
This question is similar to post on "Custom file sort order for paperless office," except I want to sort by filename "subfields." For instance in some documents representing transactions I name the files as follows: 20090731 (8 digit date)Debit_account (with underscores not spaces)Credit_accountamount ($241.35). I would like to be able to sort by the amount, which would be the 4th space delimited field. Example: "20090731 WF_Savings US_Bank $1322.43 txfr.pdf"

I would like to be able to sort by, say, the amount subfield. Seems like there should be a way to do that using a regular expression,
such as in the rename function, so that in this case the sort key could be
captured part of the pattern: "[^ ]+ [^ ]+ [^ ]+ ([^ ]+) .*". Or perhaps using two sets of parentheses to define two sort capture fields and then express their order as "\2\1" or something similar.

I've thought of some ways this could be implemented:
Such as add an expression in the filter, after a regular expression to indicate a field to sort by?

Allow specification of a subfield delimiter in the filename field (or description) and then allow sorting by a designated subfield.

I know that I can create a temporary directory with selected files, copy the desired files to it, rename them with a preset regular expression to make the desired sort subfield to be first and then sort them.

If there's something in Dopus that already does this, I'll be delighted to hear about it or any other suggestions.

2

You can tell Opus to ignore fixed prefixes when sorting. (e.g. ignoring "The |A " means The Beatles sorts under B and A Perfect Circle sorts under P.

Those prefixes can only be a list of fixed strings, though. I don't think there's a way to ignore patterns when sorting which is what you want.

You could use your temporary directory idea but do it using either an Opus file collection or standard shortcuts to the files. That way you wouldn't have to copy all the data; just the names themselves. It'd be easy enough to create buttons which reordered or removed the fields in the collections/shortcut names.

3

Thanks for the quick response. I'm reading up on shortcuts. Do I understand correctly that I can create a shortcut that could initially consist of the filename then rename the shortcut with a regular expression pattern to be the part I want to sort by, then sort the shortcuts and that would cause the file positions to be sorted as well. I'll try this out. Any chance you could give me a brief example of it.