Text Line Sorter

This tool uses JavaScript's built-in localeCompare method, which sorts strings using standard locale-aware ordering — numbers sort before letters, punctuation is handled sensibly, and the ordering closely matches what you'd expect from a dictionary or spreadsheet sort rather than a raw byte-by-byte comparison. With Case sensitive turned off (the default), 'Apple', 'apple', and 'APPLE' are treated as equivalent for sorting purposes and will sort based on their letters regardless of case, so 'apple' and 'Banana' sort in the order you'd naturally expect. With Case sensitive turned on, sorting instead respects exact character codes, which in most conventions places all uppercase letters before all lowercase letters — so 'Zebra' would sort before 'apple', which can look surprising if you're not expecting it, but is sometimes exactly what's needed for case-sensitive data processing.

These produce very different results and are easy to confuse. 'Reverse line order' simply flips the order of your lines exactly as you entered them, with no regard for alphabetical content — if your input is 'first, second, third', reversing gives you 'third, second, first', preserving whatever original ordering logic you had (chronological, priority, or otherwise). 'Z → A' sorting, on the other hand, ignores your original order entirely and re-sorts every line based on reverse alphabetical content, so 'first, second, third' becomes 'third, second, first' only coincidentally in this example — with a differently-ordered input like 'banana, apple, cherry', reversing gives 'cherry, apple, banana' (unchanged order, reversed) while Z-A sorting gives 'cherry, banana, apple' (genuinely re-sorted).

Shuffle mode uses the Fisher-Yates (also called Knuth) shuffle algorithm, which is the standard, well-studied algorithm for producing a uniformly random permutation of a list — every possible ordering of your lines is equally likely to occur, unlike some naive shuffling approaches (like sorting by a random comparator) which can produce biased, non-uniform results. Because the result is genuinely random, every time you click Shuffle Again — or make any edit to your input while Shuffle mode is selected — you'll get a fresh, independent random order, not a fixed rearrangement.

Yes. When two or more lines have exactly the same length, they retain their original relative order from your input — this is because the tool's sort is stable (JavaScript's Array.prototype.sort has been required to be a stable sort since ES2019, meaning equal elements never get reordered relative to each other). This makes length-based sorting predictable: lines of equal length won't jump around unpredictably between runs, which matters if you're using line length as a rough proxy for a secondary sort key.

A line counts as empty if it contains nothing but whitespace after trimming — that includes completely blank lines as well as lines that contain only spaces, tabs, or other whitespace characters with no visible content. Lines with any actual visible character, even a single punctuation mark or a lone space-surrounded letter, are kept. This option is applied before sorting, so removed empty lines never affect where your real content ends up, and the stats above the output show exactly how many empty lines were stripped.

No — this tool focuses purely on ordering, and deliberately keeps every line you provide, including exact duplicates, so that sorting never silently changes your data's content or count (only its order). If you also need to remove duplicate lines, use the dedicated Remove Duplicate Lines tool first, then paste the deduplicated result in here to sort it — the two tools are designed to compose cleanly together for that exact workflow.

No. All sorting, shuffling, and filtering happens entirely inside your browser using plain JavaScript — there is no server-side component involved in processing your text at any point, which you can confirm by watching your browser's network tab while using the tool. This means the tool keeps working with no internet connection once the page has loaded, and nothing you type here is stored or transmitted anywhere beyond your current browser tab.

Developers use it to alphabetize import statements, CSS class lists, or configuration keys before a code review; writers and researchers use it to organize bibliographies, glossaries, or reference lists; spreadsheet and data users use it to quickly reorder a column of values pasted as plain text without opening a full spreadsheet application; and the shuffle mode is popular for randomizing quiz questions, raffle entries, playlists, or the order of items in a survey to reduce ordering bias.