I have some lists of string elements which look like this:
{ Week 2.2012, Week 45.2014, Week 12.2011, ...}
{ Half 1.2013, Half 2.2015, Half 1.2010 ...}
{ Quarter 3.2005, Quarter 4.2010, Quarter 2.2011, ...}
Knowing that these string values cannot be parsed as DateTime (?), how can I sort the lists?
Expected result:
{ Week 12.2011, Week 2.2012, Week 45.2014, ...}
{ Half 1.2010, Half 1.2013, Half 2.2015, ...}
{ Quarter 3.2005, Quarter 4.2010, Quarter 2.2011, ...}
Create an implementation of IComparer using your custom logic and pass it to the List.Sort method.
For this solution i'd like to create a datestring parser which returns date. Next step you could use sorting list of Tuple by datetime.
Actually, it looks like these strings can be parsed as DateTime.
As far as I can understand:
Week 2.2012 is "Second week of 2012" = 15 January 2012
Half 2.2015 is "Six months of 2015" = 1 July 2015 (not quite sure with "half" though - it can have slightly different meaning)
Quarter 3.2005 is "Third quarter of 2005" = 1 October 2005
and so on.
So you can parse these values, convert them to DateTime and sort the lists.
As Andy said you can sort these data by using linq:
var sorted = list.Select(x => x.Split(' ', '.'))
.OrderBy(x => int.Parse(x[2])).ThenBy(x => int.Parse(x[1]))
.Select(x => $"{x[0]} {x[1]}.{x[2]}") //or string.Format("{0} {1}.{2}", x[0], x[1], x[2])
.ToList();
