^v️ Line Sorter

Alphabetical (A-Z or Z-A): standard dictionary sort, case-sensitive or insensitive. Numeric: sorts by value — 10 comes after 9, unlike alphabetical where 10 comes before 2. By length (shortest to longest or reverse): useful for revealing structure or optimizing CSS selector ordering. Random shuffle: Fisher-Yates algorithm for uniform random order. Reverse current order: flips existing order without re-sorting. Remove empty lines: cleans up lists with blank lines. Trim whitespace: removes leading/trailing spaces from each line before sorting.

Critical difference: alphabetical treats everything as text — "10" sorts before "2" because "1" comes before "2" in ASCII. A list sorted alphabetically: 1, 10, 100, 2, 20, 3. The same list numerically: 1, 2, 3, 10, 20, 100. For pure number lists always use numeric sort. For file names with embedded numbers (file10.txt, file2.txt), natural sort handles this correctly — pad numbers (file002.txt) to make alphabetical match natural order when natural sort is unavailable.

Use the Line Sorter to sort alphabetically, then pass the result to the Duplicate Remover on this site. Or in a terminal: sort -u file.txt sorts and deduplicates in one step. For case-insensitive sort and dedup: sort -f -u file.txt. The -u flag removes exact duplicates after applying the sort comparison, so sort -f -u applies case-insensitive deduplication after case-insensitive sorting.

Fisher-Yates (also Knuth shuffle) generates a uniformly random permutation. It iterates from end to beginning, swapping each element with a random element at or before its position. This produces a perfectly uniform random permutation — every possible ordering is equally likely. Naive approaches (sorting with Math.random() as comparator) produce biased distributions. Use Fisher-Yates for randomizing test data ordering, quiz questions, playlist shuffles, and A/B test conditions.

URLs sorted alphabetically group by protocol first (http:// before https://). To sort by domain: extract the domain with a Regex Tester pattern ((?:https?://)?([^/]+)), sort the extracted domains, then reconstruct. Alternatively use sort -t/ -k3 in a terminal to sort by the third slash-delimited field (the domain). The Line Sorter sorts full lines — for field-based sorting, preprocess with regex or command-line tools first.

Sort by length is useful for: CSS optimization (shorter selectors are faster to parse), building longest-match rule lists (route patterns, URL patterns), analyzing word frequency distribution, ordering enum values by string length for display, and finding the longest/shortest lines in log output. Sorting by ascending length naturally puts single-word items first and multi-word or long strings last — useful for quick visual scanning of a list structure.

The Duplicate Remover removes repeated lines — often used after sorting. The Word Counter counts lines before and after to verify the sort did not drop content. The Text Case Converter normalizes case before case-insensitive sorting. The Regex Tester can extract specific fields from lines for field-based sorting. The Diff Checker shows what changed between original and sorted output. All are in the Dev Tools Text section.