LINQ and a natural sort order [duplicate]

Question

This question already has an answer here:

• Natural Sort Order in C# 16 answers

What's the easiest way to get a LINQ query (from an SQL database - does that matter?) to order strings naturally?

For example, I'm currently getting these results:

• Project 1
• Project 10
• Project 2

What I'd like is to see is this:

• Project 1
• Project 2
• Project 10

The query I'm using is this:

return from p in dataContext.Projects
    orderby p.Name
    select p;

Answer 1

There is no built-in way to do this using the .NET framework but I would suggest that you read Natural Sorting in C# for a discussion on the topic and an open-source implementation.

Answer 2

I'm only a few years late to the party, but I was just trying to solve a similar problem and this worked for me. Hope someone else finds this helpful.

Say you have your strings in a List, try something like this:

List<string> projects = new List<string>
{
    "Project 1",
    "Project 10",
    "Project 2"
};
//Sort by a substring of the string value which omits the non-numeric characters
IEnumerable<string> sorted = projects.OrderBy(p => p.Substring(p.IndexOf(' ') + 2, p.Length - (p.IndexOf(' ') + 2)));