Text Sorter Tool

What this tool does

A text sorter reorders lines. This text sorter supports ascending and descending order. Numeric-aware sorting is on by default so 2 apples comes before 10 pears. Case-sensitive compare is off by default so apple and Apple sit together under a base-letter compare. The original list stays in the first box. Nothing is uploaded.

This is not a spreadsheet. There are no columns, no “sort by column 3,” and no header-row option. If your data is CSV with several fields, sort it where the columns are real. If you only needed unique lines, the Remove Duplicate Lines page keeps first-seen order and does not sort. Unique then sort is two steps on purpose.

How to use

1. Paste one item per line.
2. Choose ascending or descending. Leave numeric-aware on unless you want “10” before “2” as text. Turn case-sensitive on if Z must sort apart from z.
3. Sort. Copy writes the result. Example uses 10 / 2 / banana / Apple.

Empty input is an error. A trailing newline becomes an empty last line and will sort with other empty lines. That is visible on purpose rather than silently dropped.

Example

Example input:

10 pears
2 apples
banana
Apple

Ascending, numeric-aware, case-insensitive: 2 apples, 10 pears, Apple, banana. The numbers compare as numbers. Apple and banana compare without treating case as a different letter. Turn numeric-aware off and 10 pears can rise above 2 apples because the character 1 is less than 2. Descending reverses the same compare.

Limits

• Whole lines only. A comma is just another character on that line.
• Numeric-aware uses the browser’s localeCompare numeric option. It understands digit runs inside the line. It is not a natural-language “chapter ten” parser.
• Case-insensitive uses base-letter sensitivity. Accents may still sort apart from their base letters depending on the browser.
• This is not a locale picker. Compare uses the default locale of the browser.
• Stability is not promised when two lines compare equal.
• Input over 200,000 characters is refused.

Pasted HTML sorts as text and is not executed. If you need the list unique after sorting, run Remove Duplicate Lines on the result — or before, if you want first-seen survivors then an alphabetical list of those survivors.

The sort stays in this browser. Use it for names, filenames, and short inventory lists. Do not paste a whole spreadsheet and expect column-aware order. If two lines differ only by a trailing space, they are different lines and will not collapse; trim them on the Whitespace Cleaner first if that space is noise.

Descending is a reverse of the same compare, not a separate alphabet. If numeric-aware is on, descending puts 10 after 2 in reverse, so 10 comes first. That is easy to misread if you expected “largest word” instead of “reverse of the ascending compare.”

This text sorter tool will not shuffle, will not sample, and will not drop the header unless the header is just another line you deleted yourself. The status line reports how many lines were sorted so you can check the paste did not lose a row.