Sort Lines Alphabetically

Lines are sorted A to Z using your browser's language-aware comparison, the same kind of ordering a dictionary uses. That gives sensible results where a plain character-code sort would not:

• Capitals don't split the list. Apple and apple sit together, with the lowercase one first, instead of every capitalised line coming before every lowercase one.
• Accented letters sort with their base letter. Éclair goes next to eclair, not after zebra.

A real run:

There is no Z to A or ignore-case setting, and repeated lines are all kept. For a Z to A list, sort here and then flip the result with Reverse List Order. For a list without repeats, run the result through Remove Duplicate Lines.

Digits are compared one character at a time, so 10 comes before 2 because 1 comes before 2:

That is the sorted output of item10, item2, item1, Item3. To get numeric order, pad the numbers with leading zeros so they are all the same length (item01, item02, item10), or sort numbers in a spreadsheet, which treats them as values.

Lines that start with a digit come before lines that start with a letter.

• Leading spaces and tabs sort before any letter or digit, so an indented line jumps to the top. Run the list through Remove Extra Spaces first to strip them.
• A trailing line break adds an empty line, and empty lines sort first. If your result starts with a blank line, that's why. Remove Empty Lines clears it.
• Files saved on Windows sort correctly. The browser converts them to plain line feeds when you paste, so no hidden carriage return ends up at the end of a line and changes its position.

Because the comparison follows language rules, a few letters sort differently depending on the language your browser is set to. In English or German, Örebro sorts next to Oslo. In a browser set to Swedish, where Ö is a separate letter at the end of the alphabet, it sorts after zebra. Plain A to Z text without accents sorts the same everywhere. If you share a sorted list across countries, sort it once and send the result rather than asking everyone to sort their own copy.