Writing a Comparator for Natural Sort Order

Natural sort order is what we usually see in most file managers when browsing a list of numbered files, that it sorts the numerical part of the file name as a number instead of comparing it character by character. For instance:

Lexicographical sort Natural sort
1.txt 1.txt
10.txt 2.txt
100.txt 3.txt
101.txt 4.txt
102.txt 5.txt
103.txt 10.txt
104.txt 11.txt
105.txt 12.txt
11.txt 13.txt
12.txt 14.txt
13.txt 15.txt
14.txt 100.txt
15.txt 101.txt
2.txt 102.txt
3.txt 103.txt
4.txt 104.txt
5.txt 105.txt

Lexicographical sort can be easily implemented using String::compareToIgnoreCase, but it is not very acceptable for end users. However for natural sort, things is actually a little more complicated.

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Thoughts on Content Handling in Android Application

Introduction

For content-oriented Android application, how and where to store the content to display is a issue every developer will be concerned with. The Android framework provided a comprehensive solution with ContentProvider (and a lot more) which suits quite well with a SQLite database; but in a lot of other scenarios, the app only need to have some information cached, while the majority of content is directly retrieved from network, thus eliminating the need for a database (and a complicated content scheme).

But when we look into the core of this issue, we will soon find out that it is in fact a problem of whether to have a central storage, and how to notify different components about a change.

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