Question

I’m not really sure if what i’m looking for actually exists, so maybe you guys can help out.

I have the below data:

Apples|3211|12
Markers|221|9
Turtle|1023123123|22

The first column is always a string, the second column and third column are ints. However, what I want to do is be able to reference theses as strings or ints, and then be able to sort via the third column asc. Any ideas?

Something like MyTable[i].Column[i] and in this case MyTable[1].Column[2] would produce 12 as a int (because it’s ordered).

Answer 1

If you want type safety you will need to create a class that holds each record:

class Record
{
    string Name { get; set; }
    int SomeValue { get; set; }
    int OrderNr { get; set; }
}

Afterwards store them in a generic List<>, then you can order them, as you like:

List<Record> items = // read them into a list of items;
List<Record> orderedList = items.OrderBy(i => i.OrderNr).ToList();

UPDATE
Since it was requested I customized the answer from JustinNiessner to fit to my example:

string data = // your data as string
List<Record> records = data
    .Split('|')
    .Select(item => new Record
    { 
        Name = item[0],
        SomeValue = int.Parse(item[1]),
        OrderNr = int.Parse(item[2])
    }).ToList();

List<Record> orderedRecords = records.OrderBy(r => r.OrderNr).ToList();

This can be optimized by using var and not executing ToList() on the list, but is done this way in order to keep it simple for you to understand the concepts better.