Yesterday somebody asked a question in newsgroup about sorting of alphanumeric collection. What it meant was that ArrayList has following entries.

Now if you use a simple sorting on this list, you will end up with the following results.

This is not the type of sorting this developer was looking for. He wanted the list sorted so that results look as follows.

Now this is a situation where simple sorting on the string type data will not work. This is where we had to implement our own comparer class. The Compare method uses the following regular expression to capture different groups in it and then do an individual compare on them to get to final result of comparison.

String strPattern = @"^(?<1>\D*)(?<2>\d+)(?<3>\D*)*";
Regex regEx = new Regex(strPattern, RegexOptions.IgnoreCase);
Match m = regEx.Match(strVal);							
							

By using this approach I was able to come up with a solution which works very well under the assumption that the string will always be in the following format.

This solution will not work properly if you have numeric and text mixed all over the place.