Sort Lines

How this calculation works

The tool splits your text into lines and sorts them using locale-aware comparison, so accented characters order sensibly. Pick ascending or descending.

What the results mean

Locale-aware

Accented and non-English letters sort in a natural order rather than by raw code point.

Duplicates kept

Sorting does not remove repeats — identical lines end up adjacent, which makes them easy to see. Use the duplicate remover if you want them gone.

Blank lines

Empty lines sort to the top in ascending order, since an empty string precedes everything. Trim them first if they get in the way.

Common problems and fixes

Numbers are in the wrong order

The sort is alphabetical, so "10" comes before "2" for the same reason "ab" comes before "b". Zero-pad the numbers to a fixed width — 02, 10 — and their text order matches their numeric value. This is also why filenames like report-2 and report-10 always list in the wrong order.

Capitalised lines are grouped away from lowercase ones

That is raw code point ordering, where every uppercase letter precedes every lowercase one. The sort here is locale-aware instead, which interleaves them the way a dictionary does. If you are seeing strict case grouping, the text was sorted somewhere else first.

Leading spaces are throwing the order off

A space sorts before any letter, so an indented line lands at the top regardless of its content. Run the whitespace cleaner over the text first to trim each line, then sort — the two operations in that order handle most pasted-from-a-document text.

Frequently asked questions

More in Text

• Remove Duplicate LinesRemove duplicate lines, keeping the first of each in order.
• Reverse TextReverse text by character, word or line.
• Word CounterCount words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type.