Diacritics alphabetical ordering in C#

Question

Hello! I want to know how do you perform a reliable alphabetical ordering (for a listbox) of people's full names with the diacritics of the language in C sharp?

Thanks in advance.

Q: So you just want to treat diacritics as the "original" letter? (eg: João is the same as Joao)? – NullUserException

A: I want to treat them as they should be treated in the language I define, respecting the rules of alphabetical ordering that people apply everyday. I'm sure it's written in the grammars of each language. Thanks. – Queops

Answer 1

You can use s.Normalize(NormalizationForm.FormD) to normalize a string s, separating accented characters into unaccented characters followed by the accent symbol. You can then use CharUnicodeInfo.GetUnicodeCategory(c) == UnicodeCategory.NonSpacingMark to identify accent characters c in the normalized s. Given that, you can implement your own string comparison operator to place whatever ordering you need on accents.

Answer 2

This MSDN article should give you what you need: Comparing and Sorting Data for a Specific Culture. It describes culture sensitive comparison, sorting, and normalization, with code samples.