This week, I had a need to sort a jagged array of integers, and this is the solution that I came up with:
public class IntArraySorter
{
public static void ExampleSorting()
{
int[] a = new int[5] { 1,2,3,4,0 };
int[] b = new int[4] { 1,2,3,0 };
int[] c = new int[3] { 1,2,0 };
int[] d = new int[2] { 1,0 };
int[] e = new int[1] { 1 };
// sort a 2 dimensional array of integers
int[][] multi = new int[5][] {a,b,c,d,e};
Array.Sort(multi, CompareIntArrays);
// we can also use it to sort a List of integer arrays
List<int[]> list = new List<int[]>();
list.AddRange(new int[][] {a,b,c,d,e });
list.Sort(CompareIntArrays);
int your_breakpoint_here = 0;
}
public static int CompareIntArrays(int[] x, int[] y)
{
int length = x.Length > y.Length ? x.Length : y.Length;
int diff = 0;
for (int t = 0; t < length; t++)
{
diff = safeGet(x, t) - safeGet(y, t);
if (diff != 0) return diff;
}
return x.Length - y.Length;
}
private static int safeGet(int[] arr, int element)
{
return (element > arr.Length - 1) ? 0 : arr[element];
}
}
...this technique will work with 2 dimensional arrays of integers if they are jagged or not. So I thought that it was the type of thing that was worth posting up here for future reference.
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