TASK

Sort lines and remove duplicates

Take a list of items (one per line), sort them alphabetically or naturally, and remove duplicate lines.

1

Sorting and deduplicating a line list is a common data prep step — cleaning log entries, deduplicating URLs, preparing import lists. Sorting makes diffs readable; deduplication removes redundant entries.
2

Sort & Unique →
Paste lines. The tool sorts (ascending/descending, case-sensitive/insensitive, natural or lexicographic) and optionally removes duplicates.
3

text-trim → sort-unique
View recipe Open in Toolchain

Use the chain to deduplicate then sort in one pass, with options for trimming whitespace and ignoring blank lines.

Frequently asked questions

What is 'natural' sort vs lexicographic?: Lexicographic sorts character by character: 'file10' < 'file2' (because '1' < '2'). Natural sort treats digit sequences as numbers: 'file2' < 'file10'. Use natural sort for filenames and version-like strings.
How are duplicates identified?: By exact line equality after optional trimming. Lines that differ only in trailing whitespace are considered different unless you enable trim. For case-insensitive dedup, enable that option — but the first occurrence's case is preserved.

Workflows that solve this

Normalize case then sort and deduplicate

Convert all text to lowercase then sort lines alphabetically and remove duplicates.

Hex-encode text and analyze

Convert text to its hexadecimal representation then compute character statistics on the hex output.

Normalize and sort identifiers

Clean whitespace, convert to lowercase, then sort and deduplicate a list of identifiers.

Format raw XML document

Pretty-print a minified or unformatted XML document for human review.

Clean text then analyze word statistics

Trim and normalize text, then compute word/character/line statistics.

Clean and sort text lines

Trim whitespace from every line, then sort and deduplicate the result for a clean canonical list.

Dedent Text and Trim

Remove common indentation then trim whitespace.

Deduplicate lines and count words

Sort and remove duplicate lines, then count the remaining words to get a quick inventory.

Trim, dedupe, and sort lines

Clean a list: trim whitespace from every line, remove duplicates, and sort the result.

Extract Emails and Sort Unique

Extract email addresses then sort and deduplicate.

Trim Text and Deduplicate Sort

Trim whitespace then sort and deduplicate lines.

Normalize whitespace and wrap text

Clean up messy text by trimming lines, removing blank lines, then wrapping to a readable line width.

Learn more

Want to understand why?

How to Remove Stop Words

A beginner-level guide covering stop-words, nlp, text. Includes step-by-step instructions, common errors, troubleshooting tips, and security considerations for stop-words.

How to Sort and Deduplicate Text

Sort lines alphabetically or numerically and remove duplicate lines from a list.

Sorting Algorithm

Sorting algorithms arrange elements in order—quicksort, merge sort, and heapsort are common—with complexity ranging from O(n log n) to O(n²).

Related tools

Sort lines alphabetically, numerically, by length, or naturally; deduplicate; reverse or shuffle. Free, private, and 100% client-side.

Text Trim & Clean

Remove empty lines, trim whitespace, collapse spaces. Free, private, 100% client-side.

Find and replace text using regular expressions. Free, private, 100% client-side.