Line Sorter

Paste a list with one item per line and this tool puts it in order. Alphabetical works in either direction, but you can also sort by line length, by the first number found on each line, in reverse, or shuffle the lot at random. The extras are where it earns its keep: it can trim stray spaces, drop blank lines and remove duplicates in the same pass, so a messy list copied from a spreadsheet or an email comes out tidy.

How to use it

1. Paste your list into the box, one entry per line.
2. Choose the order you want. Numeric sorting looks at the first number on each line, so "item 10" lands after "item 2".
3. Decide whether capital letters should count, and whether to drop duplicates and blank lines.
4. Copy the sorted list from the result box.

When it helps

• Alphabetising names, keywords or product codes before pasting them somewhere else.
• Cleaning an email list: sort it, remove repeats, and the problem addresses stand out.
• Putting numbered lines in real numeric order. Plain text sorting puts 100 before 20, which is rarely what anyone wants.
• Shuffling names to pick an order without arguing about it.

Good to know

• Switch on duplicate removal before you sort if you only want unique entries; the count of lines in and out tells you how many were removed.
• Lines without any number go to the end when you sort numerically, which keeps headings or notes from jumping to the front.
• If your list has a header row, take it off first or it will be sorted along with everything else.

How the sorting order is decided

Alphabetical sorting compares lines character by character using your browser's locale rules, which is why é lands next to e rather than after z. With ignore-case switched on, "Banana" and "apple" are compared as if both were lower case, so apple comes first. Switch it off and the comparison becomes stricter, and capitals may be treated as a separate group depending on the language.

Numeric sorting works differently. The tool looks for the first number on each line, reads it as a real number (including decimals and negatives), and orders by that. Lines that tie on the number fall back to alphabetical order, and lines with no number at all are placed last. That is why a list such as item 2, item 10, item 1 comes out as 1, 2, 10 rather than 1, 10, 2.

Worked example: tidying an email list

Imagine you export fifty addresses from two mailing tools and paste them together. Some are in capitals, a few appear twice, and a handful have a trailing space from the export. Paste the lot in, leave ignore-case and trim switched on, tick remove duplicates, and choose A to Z. You get one clean alphabetical column, and the line counts above the result show how many entries went in and how many came out.

From there, copying the list into your email tool or spreadsheet is one step. If you also need the addresses grouped by domain, sort first, then use the Text Extractor to pull out just the addresses and the Find and Replace tool to strip anything you don't want.

When a spreadsheet is the better choice

For a single column, this tool is quicker than opening a spreadsheet, because there is nothing to import and nothing to save. Once your data has several columns, or you need to sort by one column while keeping rows together, a spreadsheet is the right tool. Sorting a column alone would scramble the relationship between columns.

One more caution: sorting is based on text, and numbers inside lines such as dates (03/04/2026) are compared as text unless you pick numeric. Dates written year first (2026-04-03) sort correctly as text, which is one reason that format is recommended for filenames.

Questions