Sorting months in a list

Question

I have a list of strings which contains months of the year. I need to be able to sort this list so the months are in order by month, not alphabetically. I have been searching for awhile but I can't see to wrap my head around any of the solutions I've found.

Here's an example of how the months might be added. They are added dynamically based off of fields in a SharePoint list so they can be in any order and can have duplicates (I am removing these with Distinct()).

List<string> monthList = new List<string>();
monthList.Add("June");
monthList.Add("February");
monthList.Add("August");

Would like to reorder this to:

February
June
August

Answer 1

You could parse the string into a DateTime and then sort using the month integer property. See here for supported month names: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.globalization.datetimeformatinfo.monthnames.aspx

Something like this:

var sortedMonths = monthList
    .Select(x => new { Name = x, Sort = DateTime.ParseExact(x, "MMMM", CultureInfo.InvariantCulture) })
    .OrderBy(x => x.Sort.Month)
    .Select(x => x.Name)
    .ToArray();

Answer 2

You can parse month names into dates (it assumes the current year and day 1):

monthList = monthList.OrderBy(s=> DateTime.ParseExact(s, "MMMM", new CultureInfo("en-US"))).ToList();