Sort Lines: A Practical Guide
Use Sort Lines to arrange newline-separated entries in ascending or descending order. The current comparison is locale-aware and numeric-aware, so it is more suitable for human labels than a raw byte sort. It does not remove duplicate entries.
How to Use Sort Lines
- Paste one entry per line.
- Choose Order.
- Select Process.
- Inspect numbers, accents and case variants in the result.
Natural Ordering and Locale
Numeric-aware comparison can place Item 2 before Item 10 instead of ordering only the digit characters. Base-level sensitivity can treat case and some accent differences as equivalent for comparison.
The browser’s locale can affect ordering. Do not use this as a canonical cryptographic sort or assume identical results across all language environments without testing.
Worked Example
A list containing File 10, File 2 and File 1 is intended to sort naturally as File 1, File 2, File 10 in ascending order.
A line containing several fields is sorted as a whole line; the tool does not select a CSV column as the key.
Remove exact repeats separately: use the Remove Duplicate Lines.
Check entry count: use the Line Counter.
Checks and Common Mistakes
- Use one logical item per line.
- Do not expect column-aware sorting.
- Review locale-sensitive names.
- Duplicates remain unless removed separately.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does descending reverse the order?
The sorted sequence is reversed for descending output.
Can I sort by the second column?
Not with this simple line-based workflow.
Will duplicates disappear?
No. Use Remove Duplicate Lines if exact duplicates are unwanted.
Related Tools for the Next Step
- Remove Duplicate Lines: Remove exact repeats separately.
- Line Counter: Check entry count.
- List Shuffler: Randomize rather than sort.
- Find and Replace: Normalize a known prefix.
Reference
Further reading: MDN JavaScript strings.