Werk #19684: Natural sort: handle empty strings without crashing

Component

User interface

Title

Natural sort: handle empty strings without crashing

Date

Apr 23, 2026

Level

Trivial Change

Class

Bug Fix

Compatibility

Compatible - no manual interaction needed

Checkmk versions & editions

2.6.0b1 Not yet released	Checkmk Community, Checkmk Pro, Checkmk Ultimate, Checkmk Cloud, Checkmk Ultimate MT
2.5.0p1 Not yet released	Checkmk Community, Checkmk Pro, Checkmk Ultimate, Checkmk Cloud, Checkmk Ultimate MT

Opening the Setup > Hosts page crashed with IndexError: string index out of range if the folder contained a host whose name was empty (for example due to a corrupted host definition). The natural-sort helper used to build the host list accessed the first character of every key unconditionally.

Empty keys are now treated as symbols (same sort bucket as keys starting with underscore), so the page renders instead of aborting.

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