Natural Sort Order in C#

Question

Anyone have a good resource or provide a sample of a natural order sort in C# for an FileInfo array? I am implementing the IComparer interface in

Answer 1

Inspired by Michael Parker's solution, here is an IComparer implementation that you can drop in to any of the linq ordering methods:

private class NaturalStringComparer : IComparer
{
    public int Compare(string left, string right)
    {
        int max = new[] { left, right }
            .SelectMany(x => Regex.Matches(x, @"\d+").Cast().Select(y => (int?)y.Value.Length))
            .Max() ?? 0;

        var leftPadded = Regex.Replace(left, @"\d+", m => m.Value.PadLeft(max, '0'));
        var rightPadded = Regex.Replace(right, @"\d+", m => m.Value.PadLeft(max, '0'));

        return string.Compare(leftPadded, rightPadded);
    }
}