String comparison to consider numbers

Question

I am trying to sort nodes of a treeview with respect to their text property of course. The problem is that my comparison class does not care about numbers. Here is the code:

public class TreeNodeSorter : IComparer
{
    public int Compare(object x, object y)
    {
        var tx = x as TreeNode;
        var ty = y as TreeNode;

        return string.Compare(tx.Text, ty.Text);
    }
}

And here is the result:

The first child node (Debug...) is ok, but my problem is why on earth "HBM\D10" is sorted before "HBM\D7" and so on...

Answer 1

If portability is not an issue, you can p/invoke StrCmpLogicalW(). This function is used by the Windows shell to sort the file names it displays:

public class TreeNodeSorter : IComparer
{
    [DllImport("shlwapi.dll", CharSet = CharSet.Unicode, ExactSpelling = true)]
    static extern int StrCmpLogicalW(string x, string y);

    public int Compare(object x, object y)
    {
        var tx = x as TreeNode;
        var ty = y as TreeNode;

        return StrCmpLogicalW(tx.Text, ty.Text);
    }
}