Exercise 3 - Collections and Sorting

The third exercise in 15 Exercises for Learning a new Programming Language is:

Accepting series of numbers, strings from keyboard and sorting them ascending, descending order.

The naive solution would be to build an array of entered strings/numbers and then write a method that will sort that array - a simple bubble sort would do.  Of course, .NET offers a better way…

The System.Collections and System.Collections.Generic namespaces contain a number of classes that implement such things as dynamically sized arrays, lists, ordered lists, hash tables, etc.  These classes provide methods for sorting the contents of the collections.  For this solution I decided to use a List<T> to store the input data and do the sorting.  Here’s the code:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;

class MainClass
{
    static void Main()
    {
        string inputLine;

        List<string> strings = new List<string>();
        Console.WriteLine("Enter a series of strings, one per line.  Finish with a blank line");
        while ((inputLine = Console.ReadLine()) != "")
        {
            strings.Add(inputLine);
        }
        strings.Sort();
        Console.WriteLine("Ascending list of strings:");
        foreach (string item in strings)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("   " + item);
        }
        strings.Reverse();
        Console.WriteLine("Descending list of strings:");
        foreach (string item in strings)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("   " + item);
        }

        Console.WriteLine();

        List<double> numbers = new List<double>();
        double inputNumber;
        Console.WriteLine("Enter a series of numbers, one per line.  Finish with a blank line");
        while ((inputLine = Console.ReadLine()) != "")
        {
            if (double.TryParse(inputLine, out inputNumber))
            {
                numbers.Add(inputNumber);
            }
        }
        numbers.Sort();
        Console.WriteLine("Ascending list of numbers:");
        foreach (double item in numbers)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("   " + item.ToString());
        }
        numbers.Reverse();
        Console.WriteLine("Descending list of numbers:");
        foreach (double item in numbers)
        {
            Console.WriteLine("   " + item.ToString());
        }
    }
}

Notice that this code is in two halves that are almost identical.  Lines 11 through 27 takes string input and add it to a list, then sort the list and output, then reverse the elements in the list and output again.  Lines 31 through 52 do the same for numbers (in this case double).

Aside from the variable names and the type parameter in the List<T> type, the only real difference in the code between the two sections is line 36.  Each of the numeric types have a static method called TryParse which tries to parse a value of that type from a given string, and returns true or false to indicate success or failure. There is also a Parse method which returns the parsed value directly, but throws an exception if it can’t find a value in the string.

One thing to notice about TryParse is the out modifier on the second parameter.  This modifier is like the ref modifier we saw in the swap method a couple of posts ago, except that it doesn’t require the variable used in the method call to be initialised at the time of the call.

So, that will for this post, I think.  Till next time….