Softonic

Text Sorter

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Spreadsheets sort columns, code editors sort selected lines, but a quick browser tool wins when you just need to alphabetise a bulleted list from a doc or deduplicate a messy set of emails. Paste lines, choose a sort (A-Z, Z-A, numeric, length, natural, random), toggle unique-only, and copy the tidy output.

How to sort text

  1. 1

    Paste your list

    One item per line: words, emails, filenames, numbers.

  2. 2

    Pick a sort order

    Alphabetical A-Z/Z-A, numeric, by length, natural (file1, file2, file10), or random shuffle.

  3. 3

    Set options

    Case-insensitive, strip whitespace, unique-only, ignore leading articles (the, a, an).

  4. 4

    Copy the sorted output

    One click to copy the list in the new order.

Sort modes and when to use them

Mode Best for Caveat
Alphabetical Names, terms, tags Case-insensitive optional
Numeric Pure number lists Mixed strings fall back to alphabetic
Natural Filenames (img1, img2, img10) Requires mixed letter/number tokens
Length Ranking by wordcount or char count Ties resolved alphabetically
Random Shuffles for surveys and draws Uses Fisher-Yates for unbiased shuffle

Natural sort: why it matters

Alphabetical sorting puts img10.png before img2.png because 1 comes before 2 character-by-character. Natural sort reads numeric substrings as numbers and gives img2.png, img10.png, almost always the order you wanted.

Unique mode vs dedupe tools

Unique mode removes exact duplicates after normalisation (trim whitespace, case-insensitive if set). It’s not a similarity search, John Doe and John Doe (double space) count as distinct unless whitespace is trimmed first.

Tips for clean sorting

  • Strip whitespace before sorting; a leading space ranks before every letter.
  • Case-insensitive for names and titles (zebra and Aardvark sort correctly together).
  • Ignore articles for book titles: “The Great Gatsby” sorts under G, not T.
  • One item per line. Don’t mix comma-separated values on one line with line-separated on another, the sorter can’t tell what the unit is.

Frequently Asked Questions

By default, the tool uses locale-aware sorting: café sorts near cafe, not between z and {. Switch to strict byte-order if you need ASCII-style sorting for programming use.

Yes, it uses the Fisher-Yates algorithm, so every permutation is equally likely. Good enough for raffles, interview question orders and quick sampling.

Not directly. Either pre-process to put the key column first, or use a spreadsheet which supports multi-column sort out of the box.

No. Sorting runs in your browser, your list never leaves the page.

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