Question

In my application I download some data from website providing landscape informations like population, landscape area and few more.

After parsing html code, data are stored in list of objects

public class Landscape
{
    public int Population { get; set; }
    public string Area { get; set; }
}

public List<Landscape> data;

No problem with that. Follows filling dataGrid and that’s purpose of my application. Now, where is the problem? Area info on the website is in semi-numeric, semi-string format. For example: 10 000 km2.

I have possibility to choose whether to trim km2 suffix and store data as int, or do nothing about it and store data as string. Since I want have data in dataGrid in original format, I decided not to trim.

Finally, is there a way to order rows (by size of area) as int although it is string type?

Answer 1

You can use linq to sort by the translated value but don’t think this will be fast.

public class Landscape
{
    public int Population { get; set; }
    public string Area { get; set; }

    public int TrimAndConvert()
    {
        /* Your Code to trim and convert to int */
    }
}


data.OrderBy(landscape => landscape.Area.TrimAndConvert());

I think a better way would be to save the Area as a number and add the trimmed part just for output.

public class Landscape
{
    public int Population { get; set; }
    public int AreaValue { get; set; }
    public string AreaUnit { get; set; }

    public string Area 
    {
        get 
        {
            return AreaValue.ToString() + AreaUnit;
        }
    }
}