Question

Objective

Sort a string that is displaying currency data like this $1,995.94 numerically in a set of data.

Code

I’m currently using the below code sample to convert the string value to decimal so that I can sort it properly.

if (sortBy == "checkAmount")
{
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    foreach (var c in Convert.ToString(p.GetType().GetProperty(sortBy).GetValue(p, null)))
    {
        if (!char.IsDigit(c) && c != '.') { continue; }
        sb.Append(c);
    }
    return Convert.ToDecimal(sb.ToString());
}
else
{
    return p.GetType().GetProperty(sortBy).GetValue(p, null);
}

Problem

What’s a better way of doing this? It works, and that’s cool, but it’s not very elegant.

Final Solution

The answer provided by Servy works as expected, and I used that implementation for a while, but a colleague and I found an even better way so I’m documenting it here. BTW, I ended up using this solution in the end.

decimal.Parse(input, NumberStyles.AllowCurrencySymbol | NumberStyles.Number);

Answer 1

Here is a method that most closely resembles the code you’ve provided

public static decimal Parse(string input)
{
    return decimal.Parse(Regex.Replace(input, @"[^\d.]", ""));
}

Here is an option that will support negative numbers, and will stop if it finds a second period value, thus reducing the number of strings it returns that are not valid decimal values. It also has a few other modifications not seen in the OP to handle additional cases your current code doesn’t.

public static decimal Parse(string input)
{
    return decimal.Parse(Regex.Match(input, @"-?\d{1,3}(,\d{3})*(\.\d+)?").Value);
}