Sort in alphabetical order

Separate the items with commas, semicolons or line breaks.
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This tool makes it easy to sort a list of texts in alphabetical order. If the text area contains multiple rows the tool will treat each row as a separate item. If there is only one row the tool will first try to use semicolons (;) to separate the items, but if there are no semicolons it will instead use commas (,).

The default sorting procedure is to compare each letter from left to right. The first letters that differ between two texts decide which one of them should come first. For example, the word "boat" is sorted before "book" because a comes before o in the English alphabet.

It is also possible to sort the texts by words at specific positions. To do this you first need to select the topmost checkbox (Sort by word...) and fill in the word position that you want to sort by. The first word has number 1, the second has number 2, and so on. You decide if the word positions should be counted from the left or from the right. This can for instance be used to sort a list of people based on their surnames, even though the first and middle names comes before the surname in the text.

It is possible to base the sorting on multiple words by entering a list of word positions, separated by spaces or commas. The extra word positions will be used to decide the order when the words at the first word position are the same for two texts. If all the words at the listed positions are the same for some of the texts their internal order will be based on the default sorting procedure, i.e. by comparing each letter from left to right in the whole text.

If the texts should be sorted by multiple word positions that comes after each other in a sequence it can be written as the lowest and highest word number with a hyphen (-) between them. For example, 2-4 means that the list should be sorted by the words at position 2, 3 and 4. The order is not affected by word positions that do not exist in any of the texts so it does not matter if 2-4 or 2-100 is used as long as none of the texts consist of more than 4 words.

This tool sorts the texts based on the order that the letters have in the English alphabet.

The English alphabet:
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Many languages use additional characters that are not present in the English alphabet. For example, the Swedish alphabet contains the letters Å, Ä and Ö. In English these are treated as variations of the letters A and O which means that they will not be ordered as a Swedish person might expect.

Numbers are not compared one digit at a time. Instead the tool tries to interpret the numeric value and sort them in numeric order. This means that "5" is ordered before "20" even though 2 is normally ordered before 5.

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