Question

I’ve a list which contains a string and another list in it – sample code as follows:

List<Config> ConfigLists; 

Here Config is a class containing 2 members:

• String Name
• List BinaryLists

where Binary is another class.

I want to sort ‘ConfigLists’ list based on ‘Name’ contained in each list item.

Can anyone please guide?

Also I would like to use a substring of ‘Name’ for sorting as the ‘Name’ would contain values like “Week 07”, “Week 09” etc where the substring I will take for comaparision is the numeric part of string (e.g. ’07’, ’09’ etc)

Answer 1

Linq should help here;

// using System.Linq;
ConfigLists = ConfigLists.OrderBy(x => x.Name).ToList();

…which of course can be used to sort by a substring…

// Skips "Week ";
// using System.Linq;
ConfigLists = ConfigLists.OrderBy(x => x.Name.Substring(5)).ToList();

If you have a more complex sort order or want to avoid temporary strings in your sorting, you may want to instead use an IComparer to do the sorting for you;

class WeekComparer : IComparer<Config>
{
    public int Compare(Config x, Config y)
    { 
        return string.Compare(x.Name, 5, y.Name, 5, int.MaxValue); 
    }
}

// using System.Linq;
var weekComparer = new WeekComparer();
ConfigLists = ConfigLists.OrderBy(x => x, weekComparer).ToList();

The IComparer also works with “plain old” Sort if you don’t like Linq’s syntax.

var weekComparer = new WeekComparer();
ConfigLists.Sort(weekComparer);