Natural Sort Order In-C#

In this post, I will show you how to implement natural sorting in asp.net.There are several ways to implement this, but in this post, I am going to use windows API. Check out the following link for more details

StrCmpLogicalW

Let’s start the implementation

• Create a new class named FileList and add the following code

Create a new class  NatualSort.cs add the following code

Here is the complete source code

FileList.cs

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Web;
public class FileList
{
    public FileList()
    {
    }
    public string Name { get; set; }
    public DateTime DateModified { get; set; }
    public string FileType { get; set; }
    public static List<FileList> List
    {
    get
        {
    return new List<FileList>
            {
    new FileList{Name="file11.txt",DateModified=DateTime.Now,FileType="Text"},
    new FileList{Name="file1.txt",DateModified=DateTime.Now,FileType="Text"},
    new FileList{Name="file21.exe",DateModified=DateTime.Now,FileType="Application"},
    new FileList{Name="file100.mp3",DateModified=DateTime.Now,FileType="MultiMedia"},
    new FileList{Name="file19011.jpg",DateModified=DateTime.Now,FileType="iamge"},
            };
        }
    }
}

NaturalSort.cs

Create a class NaturalSort.cs and add the following code.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Security;
using System.Runtime.InteropServices;
[SuppressUnmanagedCodeSecurity]
internal static class SafeNativeMethods
{
  [DllImport("shlwapi.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode)]
  public static extern int StrCmpLogicalW(string psz1, string psz2);
}
public sealed class NaturalFileComparer : IComparer<FileList>
{
  public int Compare(FileList x, FileList y)
  {
  return SafeNativeMethods.StrCmpLogicalW(x.Name, y.Name);
  }
}

How to use

void Main()
{
	var list = FileList.List;
	list.Sort(new NaturalFileComparer());
	Console.WriteLine(list);
}