One thing I do with D'Addarios is take them out of the package and just feel the weight of the strings individually and lay them out in order. If you pay attention, you can easily tell which is which by weight as well as the pliability of the string. I had to do this a couple of times when I previously removed the bag of string from the box, didn't restring because something came up, threw away the empty box, then found the bag of string without the box. After doing that a couple of times, I found I didn't need to look at the color coding at all.
As for the octave too high ... 30 years ago I tried to do that with a low E ... the string snapped and went through my finger and hit my fingernail. Since then, I started changing strings one at a time so I had a tuning reference. I don't have that problem anymore when I remove all strings for thorough cleaning, but I still rather just restring one at a time.
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