Text Sorter & Duplicate Remover

Because sorting numbers as text gives the wrong answer, and it is a genuinely common trap. Alphabetically, 10 comes before 9, because the comparison looks at the first character and 1 sorts before 9. That is correct for text and wrong for quantities. Numeric mode reads the number out of each line and compares the values, so 9, 10 and 100 come back in that order. It also finds a number inside a longer line, so item 9 and item 10 sort sensibly, and lines with no number at all sort to the end rather than being treated as zero.

It decides whether Apple and apple are the same entry. Case-sensitive treats them as two distinct lines and keeps both, which is what you want for anything where capitalisation carries meaning — identifiers, file paths on a case-sensitive filesystem, or codes. Case-insensitive treats them as one and keeps only the first, which is what you want for email addresses, tags, or a list of names that has been typed inconsistently. The tool reports how many duplicates it removed either way, so you can tell whether the setting made a difference.

The first occurrence, in the order the lines arrived, before any sorting is applied. This matters when the lines are not byte-identical — for instance with case-insensitive matching, where Apple and apple are treated as the same entry, the one that appears first in your input is the one kept. If you want a specific version to win, put it first, or trim the lines before deduplicating so the comparison is on the content you care about.

Not unless you ask it to. Trimming is a separate option, off by default, because leading whitespace is sometimes meaningful — in indented code, or in a list where the indentation records structure. When trimming is on it strips leading and trailing spaces from every line, which frequently exposes duplicates that were hiding behind a stray space. That interaction is worth knowing: turning on both trimming and deduplication usually removes more lines than deduplication alone.

Comfortably tens of thousands of lines. Everything runs in your browser, so the practical limit is your machine's memory rather than any server quota, and there is no upload step to wait for. Very large pastes may take a moment to render but the sorting itself is fast. Because nothing is transmitted, this is also the right kind of tool for a list you would not want to paste into a service — a customer export, a set of internal hostnames, or anything under an agreement.

It probably is not — it is following your locale's rules rather than raw character codes. Sorting uses your browser's collation, which knows that in most European languages é belongs with e rather than after z, where its underlying character code would put it. That produces the ordering a person expects for the language they are reading. If you specifically need a raw byte ordering instead, that is a different operation and this tool does not offer it, because it is almost never what someone actually wants.