Sorting DataTable consists of string of Integers and Chars

Question

I have a DataTable with column CourseNr of type String with following values:

"121"
"111"
"108"
"122"
"BH20"
"PHD45"
"ADH90"

I want to sort CourseNr column (Integers in ASC order) and (Chars in ASC alphabetically order)like this:

"108"
"111"
"121"
"122"
"ADH90"
"BH20"
"PHD45"

I know There can be many possible suggestions to solve this, But I need some best possible approach to achieve this?

So some approach of what you have tried and then we can help fix it — Gilad Green, Oct 19 '17 at 09:29
Its no matter, just in alphabetically order if its a mix of ints and chars like: "PHD45" — SPBeginer, Oct 19 '17 at 09:40

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 19 '17 at 09:40

You can use the windows-builtin natural-sort(like f.e. files are ordered) StrCmpLogicalW:

Compares two Unicode strings. Digits in the strings are considered as numerical content rather than text. This test is not case-sensitive.

[SuppressUnmanagedCodeSecurity]
internal static class SafeNativeMethods
{
    [DllImport("shlwapi.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
    public static extern int StrCmpLogicalW(string psz1, string psz2);
}

public sealed class NaturalStringComparer : IComparer<string>
{
    public int Compare(string a, string b)
    {
        return SafeNativeMethods.StrCmpLogicalW(a, b);
    }
}

Then the code to sort the DataTable is easy with LINQ:

table = table.AsEnumerable()
  .OrderBy(r => r.Field<string>("CourseNr"), new NaturalStringComparer())
  .CopyToDataTable();

(credits for NaturalStringComparer to: https://stackoverflow.com/a/248613/284240)

This is the best possible way!! Thanks Tim – SPBeginer Oct 19 '17 at 10:00 — SPBeginer, Oct 19 '17 at 10:00

Sorting DataTable consists of string of Integers and Chars

1 Answers1