Sorting order of the elemetns

Dharmendra Kumar

Hi All,

I will be highly obliged if you could solve my issue.

The issue which I am facing that is about the sorting order of the Special Chars, Numbers and Alphbets.

I think default sorting is Special Chars -> Numbers -> Alphbets in Ascending order. Suppose I have below data

"Test1","12234","23","@abc","@123"
if we sort the above data in c# in ascending order then we will get the following result

"@123","@abc","12234","23","test1"

But as per my requirement , I want the sorting to be Numbers -> Special Chars ->Alphabets

The above result should come as

"12234","23","@123","@abc","test1"

And these results I am displaying in the DataGrid, So I want to change the way of default sorting of the grid so that the above result can be achieved.

3 Replies

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Jignesh Trivedi12y ago
Hi,
Agree with Vulpes, using custom comparator we can do sorting of array as we want.
Please refer
http://www.java2s.com/Tutorial/CSharp/0220__Data-Structure/SortarraylistusingcustomIComparer.htm
hope this will help you.
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Vulpes12y ago
It struck me subsequently that the first version of the program wasn't properly case insensitive. Although A or a sorted before B or b, if a word began with B it would be considered to sort before one beginning with b regardless of the subsequent letters.

So I've altered it now so that it truly is case insensitive :)
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Vulpes12y ago
You'll need to write a custom IComparer to achieve this sorting order.

I've written one below which seems to be working OK but I'd check it carefully to ensure I've got the ASCII characters in the range 32 - 126 in the correct order.

I've ignored case when sorting letters so A or a will sort before B or b etc.

Control characters (< 32) or non-ASCII characters (> 126) should sort normally.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;

public class NSAComparer: IComparer
{
private const string nsa = @"0123456789A !""#$%&'()*+,-./:;<=>?@[\]^_`{|}~abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";

public int Compare(string s, string t)
{
s = s.ToLower();
t = t.ToLower();
int min = Math.Min(s.Length, t.Length);
for(int i = 0; i < min; i++)
{
if (s[i] < 32 || t[i] < 32 || s[i] > 126 || t[i] > 126)
{
if (s[i] < t[i])
return -1;
else if (s[i] > t[i])
return 1;
}
else if (nsa.IndexOf(s[i]) < nsa.IndexOf(t[i]))
return -1;
else if (nsa.IndexOf(s[i]) > nsa.IndexOf(t[i]))
return 1;
}

if (s.Length < t.Length)
return -1;
else if (s.Length > t.Length)
return 1;
else
return 0;
}

}

class Program
{
static void Main()
{
string[] words = {"Test1","12234","23","@abc","@123"};
Array.Sort(words, new NSAComparer());
foreach(string word in words) Console.WriteLine(word);
Console.ReadKey();
}
}

The output is:

12234
23
@123
@abc
Test1

If you're happy with this, perhaps I could leave you to change the default sorting order to it in whatever DataGrid you're using.
0