Re: CompareTo issue.

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From: Ben Spigle (BenSpigle_at_discussions.microsoft.com)
Date: 08/08/04 

Date: Sun, 8 Aug 2004 08:57:01 -0700

Hmm... Maybe you can explain what's so hard about sorting strings. In 25
years in computing I have never before encountered a system that couldn't
sort a list of strings. It's a pretty basic requirement in computing.

I'm trying to sort a list to use in a binary search, where the search key
does not have to be completely specified. Here's how the list I gave it
sorted (quotation marks are just to mark the beginning/end of the key.)
"1005-","10050","1005-0","100500","1005-00","1005-00
","100500 ","100501","1005-01",
"1005-01 ","100501 ","1005-1"
Given a key of "10050" you would hope to get "10050","100500","100500
 ". With this screwed up sort, however, the algorithm would terminate when
it it saw "1005-0" so neither "100500" and "100500 " would appear in
the result list.
"Sijin Joseph" wrote:

> When comparing strings less than and greater than are very hard to define,
> the important thing we need to look at is equality.
>
> --
> Sijin Joseph
> http://www.indiangeek.net
> http://weblogs.asp.net/sjoseph
>
>
> "Ben Spigle" <Ben Spigle@discussions.microsoft.com> wrote in message
> news:4DDDFC4C-2B91-4A83-9FD4-4B1724E4BC47@microsoft.com...
> > I have a situtation where CompareTo is returning strange results when
> having
> > dashes in strings. The most concise illustration is:
> > "10050".CompareTo("1005-") = 1
> > "10050".CompareTo("1005-0") = -1
> > I have run alot more tests (I can post a short program if useful), but the
> > rule seems to be - < 0 at the end of a string but - = 0 in the middle of a
> > string.
> >
> > Does anybody know what's going on here?
>
>
>

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