Question

I always assumed that .Net compares strings lexicographically, according to the current culture. But there is something strange when one of the strings ends on ‘-‘:

"+".CompareTo("-")
Returns: 1

"+1".CompareTo("-1")
Returns: -1

I get it an all cultures I tried, including the invariant one.
Can anyone explain what is going on, and how can I get the consistent character-by-character ordering for the current locale?

Answer 1

There isn’t necessarily a consistent character-by-character ordering for any particular locale.

From the MSDN documentation:

For example, a culture could specify that certain combinations of characters
be treated as a single character, or uppercase and lowercase characters
be compared in a particular way, or that the sorting order of a character
depends on the characters that precede or follow it.

The only way to ensure consistent character-by-character ordering is by using an ordinal comparison, as demonstrated in Anton’s answer.