Sort Lines

Alphabetical sorting uses the browser's locale-aware comparison with numeric collation switched on. That second part matters more than it sounds: a plain text sort puts “item 10” before “item 9”, because it compares character by character and “1” sorts before “9”. Numeric collation reads the digits as a number and orders them the way a human expects.

Locale awareness also means accented letters sort next to their base letter rather than after Z, and non-Latin scripts sort by their own conventions instead of by code point.

Numeric mode is different: it extracts the first number found anywhere in each line and sorts on that, ignoring the surrounding text. It is what you want for lines like Invoice 1043 — Amman. Lines with no number are placed at the end rather than being treated as zero, which would scatter them through the results.

Shuffle uses a Fisher–Yates shuffle, which gives every possible ordering the same probability. The naive alternative — sorting with a random comparator — is biased and produces noticeably non-random results.

You have a list of file names to put in order:

chapter 9.txt
chapter 10.txt
chapter 1.txt
chapter 2.txt

Choose A → Z. The result is 1, 2, 9, 10 — correct, because numeric collation is on. A plain sort, which is what a spreadsheet or a naive script gives you, would produce 1, 10, 2, 9. This is the single most common frustration with sorting file names, and it is fixed here by default.

Now a different list: invoice lines like Invoice 1043 — Amman — 240 JOD. Choose Largest number first and the lines order by invoice number descending — the tool takes the first number in each line, which is 1043, not the 240 at the end. Worth knowing when your lines contain more than one figure.

For a prize draw, paste the entrant list and choose Shuffle randomly. Press Shuffle again to redraw without retyping anything. The first line is your winner.

If the list has repeated entries, deduplicate before sorting — that order keeps the first occurrence of each rather than an arbitrary one.