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Sort lines by length

Sort lines from shortest to longest, or the other way round.

Related tools

All Transform & clean tools →
Sort linesSort lines alphabetically, remove duplicates and trim whitespace.Sort numbersSort a list of numbers in ascending or descending order.Comma-separated ↔ linesConvert a comma-separated list into lines, or lines back into a comma list.Find duplicate linesShow only the lines that appear more than once in your text.Filter linesKeep or remove the lines that contain a given word or phrase.Add prefix / suffix to linesAdd text at the start and/or end of every line.Remove blank linesDelete all empty or whitespace-only lines from your text.Remove duplicate linesDelete repeated lines while keeping the original order of the first occurrences.

Sort lines by length works straight from this page — free, instant, nothing to install. You will find it under Transform & clean, with Sort lines and Sort numbers for the neighbouring cases.

How to use it

  1. Open the tool — no signup or install needed.
  2. Enter your input or adjust the available options.
  3. Get your result instantly, then copy or download it.

Frequently asked questions

What does Sort lines by length do?

Sort lines from shortest to longest, or the other way round.

When would I actually use this?

Cleaning up a paste before it goes anywhere: stripping duplicates from a list, normalising case, removing accents for a filename, or sorting lines.

What is the most common mistake?

Sorting text as if it were ASCII. Accented letters land after Z in a byte sort, which puts "Zurich" before "Émile" and produces a list no reader will accept.

How is Sort lines by length different from Sort lines?

They sit next to each other but answer different questions: Sort lines is the one to open when you need it to sort lines alphabetically, remove duplicates and trim whitespace. Pick whichever matches what you're starting from — both are free.

Is there a tool for the next step?

Sort numbers is the closest one after this: Sort a list of numbers in ascending or descending order.

What else is worth having open alongside it?

Comma-separated ↔ lines and Find duplicate lines — they come up in the same task often enough to be worth a second tab.

Where do the figures come from?

Transformations use the browser's Unicode-aware string handling, so case changes and sorting respect the locale rather than byte order. Nothing is truncated: what comes out is the whole of what went in.

Further reading

All guides →
ExplainerSorting Text Is Not One Operation: Four Orderings That All Call Themselves AlphabeticalCode-unit order, natural order and locale collation run on the same list in Node, with the outputs printed. Why Zebra beats apple, why item10 beats item9, and why ä sits next to a in German but after z in Swedish.How-toFiltering Lines by a Pattern Without a Command LineThis is grep for people who do not use grep, with one important difference: the match is a plain substring, so a real regular expression returns an empty box and no error. Every claim here was checked by running the tool.ExplainerFinding Duplicates in a List Without a SpreadsheetTwo lines that look identical are often not identical. Case, a trailing space, a no-break space and two different encodings of the same accented letter were each run through the duplicate finder, and it reported no duplicates for three of the four.How-toNumbering the Lines of a Text for a Review with Several PeopleNumbering starts at 1 and cannot be set to 0, the alignment is spaces rather than zeros, and the remover undoes eight of the eleven separators without touching the indentation. What it still cannot do is tell your numbers from its own.GuideCleaning Up a List Pasted from a Spreadsheet or a PDFA paste carries characters you cannot see: no-break spaces, soft hyphens, zero-width spaces, tabs and CRLF. Four cleanup tools were run against each of them, and they use three different definitions of whitespace.How-toCleaning Messy Text: The Order of Operations That Actually MattersStrip tags before decoding entities, trim before deduplicating, collapse whitespace last. Three orderings run in Node, a nine-step pipeline in the right sequence, and the invisible characters — U+00A0, U+200B, U+FEFF — that survive every naive cleanup.