Sort lines

How to Sort

1. 1

   Paste your list

   One item per line. Or drop a .txt or .csv file up to 5 MB.

2. 2

   Choose how to sort

   Six orders, ascending or descending. The result updates as you change anything.

3. 3

   Copy or download

   One click for the clipboard, one for a .txt file.

Why ё and ä end up in the wrong place elsewhere

Sorting strings by comparing them character by character sorts by Unicode code point, and code point order is not alphabetical order in any language including English: it puts every capital letter before every lowercase one, so Zebra comes before apple. In Russian, ё sits far away from е and lands at the end of the list. In German, ä sorts after z. This page uses the browser's built-in collator with your interface language, which knows the actual alphabet, so ё goes next to е and ä goes next to a, exactly where a person looking for it would expect.

item2 before item10

Alphabetical sorting puts item10 before item2, because 1 comes before 2 and that is all a character comparison can see. Natural sorting reads runs of digits as numbers, so item2, item10 and item100 come out in that order. This is the right choice for anything with a number in the name, such as filenames, version strings and chapter headings, and the wrong one only when you genuinely want the character order.

Sorting by a column

Set a column number and pick a separator, and the sort key becomes that field rather than the whole line, but the whole line still comes out in the result, unchanged. That distinction matters: a tool that sorted by the third column and then gave you only the third column back would have quietly destroyed the rest of your data. Lines that have no such field get an empty key and gather at the start rather than being dropped.

Shuffling is not Math.random

The shuffle here is a Fisher-Yates pass driven by the browser's cryptographic random source. That sounds like overkill for reordering a list, and it is the difference between a shuffle that is actually uniform and one that has a visible bias: on a list of tens of thousands of lines, a naive shuffle leaves some items nearer the top than chance would.

Equal lines keep their order

JavaScript's sort is required to be stable, which means two lines with the same sort key stay in the order they came in. That is what makes sorting by one column and then another work as a two-level sort, and it is why descending order here is produced by reversing after sorting rather than by flipping the comparison, since reversing preserves the property in mirror image.

Frequently asked questions