Question

Maybe this has been answered before, but I was not able to find it. Basicly this is the problem. I have a list of image files in a directory. They are numbered from 1-n where n -s greater than 10. In my program I create a file object pointing to the directory the files are in, and then call “listFiles()” on the file object. It returns the files, but in the following order:

filename1.jpg
filename10.jpg
filename11.jpg
...
filename2.jpg
filename20.jpg
filename21.jpg
...

Is this the OS reporting the file like this? How Do I stop it from doing this?

Answer 1

The documentation clearly states

There is no guarantee that the name strings in the resulting array will appear in any specific order; they are not, in particular, guaranteed to appear in alphabetical order.

So you should simply not rely on this. You could sort them if you want to get always the same order, using:

Arrays.sort(Object[] object);

or

Arrays.sort(T[] a, Comparator<? super T> c);