Text Sorter

Text Sorter takes whatever you paste, treats every line as one item, and returns those lines in alphabetical (A-to-Z) order. It fits the small, frequent jobs where order is the only thing wrong with your text: a column of names or SKUs copied out of a spreadsheet that came back unsorted, a glossary or reference list you want to scan quickly, or a set of CSS imports, package names, or environment-variable keys a teammate will diff against. Because each line is sorted independently, it works equally well on a flat list of cities, a roster of email addresses, or a bullet dump from meeting notes.

For office and admin work it tidies attendee lists, tag sets, and category names before they go into a document or form. For data prep it gives you a deterministic, repeatable ordering, which makes two versions of a list far easier to compare side by side. It is deliberately a single-purpose utility rather than a spreadsheet replacement: reach for it when the content is already correct and you only need it in order.

The flow is direct: paste or type into the Input box, then press Run (or Ctrl/Cmd+Enter). The result appears in the read-only Output box with a live line and character count, and you can Copy it to the clipboard or Download it as a plain-text file named formatos-text-sorter.txt. Reset restores the sample, and a small clear button empties the output. Everything runs in your browser; on this site the text you paste is not uploaded and nothing persists once you close the tab.

Under the hood it splits on line breaks (both Unix and Windows endings are handled), sorts using your locale's collation rules through the browser's comparison, then rejoins with newlines. That locale awareness means accented and non-English characters are ordered sensibly rather than dumped by raw byte value. What it does not do is just as important: there is one order only, ascending alphabetical. There is no descending option, no case-sensitivity switch, no numeric mode, and it does not remove duplicates or blank lines, trim whitespace, or sort by a column or key within each line.

The most common surprise is numbers. Because lines are compared as text, "10" sorts before "2", and "item12" comes before "item2". If your lines begin with numbers and you need true numeric order, this tool will not give it to you; pad the numbers to equal width first (02, 10) or sort in a spreadsheet instead. Leading spaces and tabs also count as characters, so an indented line can land far from where you expect, and fully blank lines tend to collect at the top.

Two more things to watch. Capitalization and locale affect placement: depending on your locale, mixed-case entries may interleave rather than group all capitals together, so results can differ slightly from another machine's. And since duplicates are kept, a sorted list can still contain repeats lined up next to each other. If you wanted unique values, run a duplicate remover afterward. Finally, this is a per-line sort only, so it cannot reorder by surname, by a CSV column, or by anything other than the start of each line.

Compare the input and output line counts shown beneath each box: unless you expected blank lines to move or merge, they should match, which confirms nothing was dropped. Skim the top and bottom of the result, since that is where the surprises live, blank or whitespace-led lines at the top and any number-as-text ordering throughout. Spot-check a few entries you know should be adjacent, and if you needed numeric or unique results, confirm those separately because this tool provides neither.

For anything official, financial, or legal, such as account lists, invoice line items, statutory references, or evidence exhibits, verify the ordering by hand against the source rather than assuming alphabetical equals correct. Reordering can silently mask a missing or duplicated entry, and the right sequence for those documents is often numeric, chronological, or rule-based rather than A-to-Z. Treat the output as a fast first pass and confirm it against the authoritative record before you submit or share it.