How does OrderBy work with regard to strings in C#?

Question

Consider this code

var strings2 = new List<string>
    {
        "0", // Ascii code 48 (decimal)
        "|"  // Ascii code 125 (decimal)
    };
var sorted = strings2.OrderBy(x => x).ToArray();

Sorted contains "|", "0". Now consider this code (all I did was change "|" to ".")

var strings2 = new List<string>
    {
        "0", // Ascii code 48 (decimal)
        "."  // Ascii code 46 (decimal)
    };
var sorted = strings2.OrderBy(x => x).ToArray();

Now sorted contains ".", "0" In both cases the "0" comes at the end even though 125 > 48, what is going on here?

Answer 1

The order depends on the culture that you use.

You can pass the culture in an overload to OrderBy.

var sorted = strings2.OrderBy(x => x, StringComparer.InvariantCulture)

Answer 2

Here you go:

The comparison uses the current culture to obtain culture-specific information such as casing rules and the alphabetic order of individual characters. For example, a culture could specify that certain combinations of characters be treated as a single character, or uppercase and lowercase characters be compared in a particular way, or that the sorting order of a character depends on the characters that precede or follow it.

Source: String.Compare Method on MSDN