Sort by Line Length

What Is the Sort by Line Length Tool?

The Sort by Line Length tool reorders the lines in your text based on how many characters each line contains, arranging them from shortest to longest or longest to shortest. Each line is measured as-is and placed into the new order accordingly. It is useful for visually organizing text, finding outlier lines that are much longer or shorter than the rest, or preparing content for processing where line length order matters.

Sorting by length is one of those operations that is surprisingly hard to do manually across anything more than a handful of lines, and the visual result can be quite revealing about how varied your line lengths actually are.

How to Use This Tool

1. Paste or type your text into the input box above. Each line is treated as a separate item to measure and sort.
2. The tool is set to sort lines from shortest to longest by default. If a direction option is available, choose ascending (shortest first) or descending (longest first) depending on what you need.
3. Click Sort by Length and the lines are rearranged in order of their character count.
4. Copy the result using the Copy button, or select and copy manually. Use Clear to reset the input.

When Would You Use This?

Spotting unusually long or short lines in a block of exported or copied text, where sorting by length immediately surfaces the outliers at either end of the sorted output.

Organizing a list of items, labels, or entries by length for visual presentation or layout purposes, where shorter entries at the top creates a cleaner reading flow or a specific visual shape.

Preparing lines of data for a system that processes or displays them in length order, or for checking whether any lines exceed a maximum character limit by sorting longest-first and checking the top entries.

Examples

Sorting lines shortest to longest

Input   : The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog
Hi
Hello there
Good morning
Output (ascending): Hi
Hello there
Good morning
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

Sorting lines longest to shortest

Input   : cat
elephant
dog
hippopotamus
ox
Output (descending): hippopotamus
elephant
cat
dog
ox

Finding outlier lines in a data block

Input   : alice@email.com
b@x.co
carol.smith.jones@longdomain.co.uk
ed@hi.io
Output (ascending): b@x.co
ed@hi.io
alice@email.com
carol.smith.jones@longdomain.co.uk
(Longest entry immediately visible at the bottom)

Mixed length lines sorted ascending

Input   : one
twenty-two characters here
four
a medium length line sits here
Output  : one
four
twenty-two characters here
a medium length line sits here

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I sort lines by length in a text file?

Paste the file contents into the input box and click Sort by Length. The lines are reordered by character count. Copy the result and save it back to your file.

How do I sort lines by length in Python?

Use sorted() with len as the key: sorted(lines, key=len) for ascending order, or sorted(lines, key=len, reverse=True) for descending. For a quick no-code sort, paste into this tool.

How do I sort lines by length in Notepad++?

Notepad++ does not have a native sort-by-length feature. You would need a plugin or a macro to do it. For plain text outside of Notepad++, this tool handles it directly.

Does it sort alphabetically or by character count?

By character count only. Two lines with the same length will appear adjacent in the output but their relative order may vary. If you need alphabetical sorting, use a different sort tool.

Does it count spaces in the line length?

Yes. Every character in the line is counted including spaces, so a line with a lot of spacing will be measured as longer than it might visually appear.

How do I sort text by word count instead of character count?

This tool sorts by character count. For word count sorting, you would need a tool specifically designed for that, or a script that counts words per line and sorts accordingly.

Can I sort longest lines first?

Yes, if the tool provides a descending option, select it before clicking Sort by Length. Sorting longest first is useful when you want to find lines that might be over a character limit.

Will blank lines appear at the top or bottom?

Blank lines have zero characters, so in ascending order they appear at the very top. In descending order they appear at the bottom. If you do not want blank lines in the sorted output, remove them first using a remove empty lines tool.

Is there a line limit for the tool?

No hard limit is set. For typical content like a list, a data export, or a block of text, it handles the full input.