Don't Panic ... Undo!

We've given you, '3', count them, THREE Undo operations! If only life had even one! If you find that you've hopelessly corrupted your list, and all hope is lost, fear not. Just press the "Undo" button at the top of your page, and time will be reversed, and all will be well again.

Why do we mention this, right up front? Because we want you to relax and play with

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, and not get hung up on "screwing up". We all make mistakes, which is why "Undo" was invented. Get in there and start pushing buttons. Nothing is intimidating after you play with it for awhile, and "Undo" gives you that luxury.

Usage Summary

For the experts out there, here's the run-down...

• Copy the list or data that you want to process to your clipboard.
• Paste it into the area provided.
• Tell
  

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  the character that separates your items
• this "input separator" is usually a comma or space
• you can reformat your data by selecting a different "output separator"
• Pick a Sorting Method from the drop-down list
• Click the "Sort" button
• Select your sorted data and copy it
• Paste it back in your own program or web application

Some things that might surprise you.

• Tabs: Even though it's a web app, you can use your TAB key to create tabs.
• Selected Text: Anything that you can do to the whole list, you can do to a partial list as well, by selecting the part of the list you want to modify and then executing the function.

I Lost My Quotes!

We use quotation marks for our data parsing. This will result, frequently, in quotation marks that you placed in your list, being stripped as "unneeded".

A work-around to this, is to do a "Replace" of your quotation marks with some other, unused character. Then, when you're done sorting, "Replace" back from that character to quotation marks again.

Garbage on Load File

We read text files. That's all we read. We're serious this time! A lot of you are trying to upload .doc files (Microsoft Word), .xls files (Microsoft Excel) .jpg files (OK, you guys are insane) and so on.

We'll happily attempt to load the file for you, but you probably won't like what you see if it's not a text file.

Why don't we read doc and xls files?
We're really not trying to be difficult here. We would if we could. To our knowledge, there's no affordable way to do so, without changing our web hosting provider and rewriting our website. Our system is not a windows system, and so there's not a lot of ways to read windows type files.

Case Changes

• Convert all your text to lowercase characters
• Convert all your text to RaNdOm case characters
• OK, we're unsure why you would do this, but it's fun.
• Perhaps to send a really annoying email to somebody.
• Convert all your text to Uppercase characters
• Capitalize the 1st letter of each term

These can be accomplished with a single button click.

Terms, Input Seperators, and Output Seperators

What are all of these words, anyway?

Term
A "Term" is an "item". An item on a list can be a single word, but it could also be many words, or even many sentences, or even many paragraphs. When you see the word "Term", think "list item".

Seperator
A "Seperator" is the method that we use to figure out where one Term stops, and another Term begins. This is often a comma, if you're pasting from another computer program.

Input Seperator
The Input Seperator is what

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uses when it goes to process your list, to determine where one items ends and the next item begins. If you click a button on

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, and nothing happens, there's a good chance that

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found only a single item on your list, due to the fact that you selected an input seperator that didn't exist in your data, so

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said "It's all one Term!"

Output Seperator
The Output Seperator causes some people confusion, but it's a very important feature of

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. The Output Seperator is simply the seperator you want your list to have NOW. You say that your list is seperated by commas, but you want it seperated by spaces, so it's easier to read? No problem! Just click on a new Output Seperator, and your list will be processed, giving it the new seperator.

We'll keep your Seperators Synched!
Notice carefully what happens when you click on a new Input Separator. See how the output seperator changes to match it? That's how we make sure that the format of your list doesn't change without your permission!

Now, notice what happens when you click on a new Output Seperator. First, we go ahead and reformat your list for you, immediatly, to use the new Output Seperator. But then, we go ahead and change your Input Seperator to match it! Why do we bother? Because you may choose to process your list some more. Don't worry, you can always switch the Input Seperator back again, if you need to.

"Trim Spaces" / "Remove Whitespace"

Trim Spaces
it's very common for spaces to creep into our data and lists. Usually, they manage to do it before the first word, or after the last word. So, programmers use the word "Trim" to mean, "Cut off all those extra spaces before and after".

Remove Whitespace
Whitespace means, 'things in your document that you cannot see.' That's generally spaces. "But wait!" you say. "I thought we already removed the spaces with 'Trim'? Why do we need 'Remove Whitespace'?"

Well, it turns out, there may be more "Whitespace" then just extra spaces at the beginning and end of a list item. There can also be, well, spaces in the middle of a list item. We want to get rid of those, too, but 'Trim' obstinately ignores them, since they're in the middle. Also, there's other "Whitespace" besides spaces. There's line-breaks. 'Remove Whitespace' gets rid of all of this stuff for you.

"Remove Duplicates"

This one is pretty easy. It looks through your data, looking for two or more of something, and if it finds them, it deletes all but one of them.

We were torn whether to keep this "case sensitive" or not. In short, "Remove Duplicates" is case sensitive. That means that the word "frog" is NOT a duplicate of the word "Frog", "fRog", "FRog", etc. If you think they're all the same, we felt you would probably be planning on converting your entire list to uppercase or lowercase, to make it pretty, and then you can remove all of the extra "frog's" ruthlessly, using "Remove Duplicates"

"Remove Non-AlphaNumeric"

We look through your data, looking for any character that's not A-Z or 0-9. If we find anything, we delete it!

"But wait! My term seperators are commas or periods, or something that is definitely NOT a letter or a number. I don't want to lose those!" You say breathlessly.

All is not lost. This operation acts on your list items, not on the character that seperates them.

"Add / Remove Labels"

You have your list, just the way you want it, and you're ready to print it, or email it to your kids soccer coach. But then you say, "I wish I had each Item numbered." Well, you're in luck!

# Item
We'll throw on a number in front of each of your list items. What's more, you get to select the symbol or symbols that appear between the number and your list item. So, you can have ...

.. you get the idea.

A Item
We'll throw on a letter in front of each of your list items. You still get to select the symbol or symbols that appear between the letter and your list item. Run out of letters? No problem! We'll go to double letters and even further. So, again, you can have ...

.. or anything else you can come up with.

Prune till ':'
So, let's say you've already added those numbers or letters, and you change your mind? Well, you could use the handy "Undo" button at the top of your screen, but perhaps you're tired of "Undo", or you pasted the list in from somewhere else, and you really, really, want to remove the item labels.

We've got you covered. With Prune till ':', we'll delete everything we see up to AND INCLUDING the symbol you've picked. For this example, our seperator is a ' : ' This is really handy for deleting those pesky item labels that somebody brazenly populated your list with. It's also potentially a pretty good tool for other tasks, not labels related, where you see an opporutnity to easily delete some data that you don't need.

Prune after ':'
OK, this is really, not label related at all. But we liked the "Prune till ':'" so much, we thought it would be really neat to have a "Prune after ':' ". Now, if you actually use it on a list with labels, it will leave you with ONLY THE LABELS, which, we must admit, is pretty pointless. You may have a dataset, however, that has a character towards the end of each item, and everything after that character is useless to you. Should you ever have a list or data set, where this will be of use to you to delete some unneeded bytes, please feel free to use it with our blessing.

SORT A-Z (Alphabetize)

Finally, we get to the actual sorting. This is a sorting website, right?

Our most popular sort, is to sort the list alphabetically. People just like to have their lists in this particular order. We're sure that if we knew the answer to why that is, the universe would offer it's other mysteries up to us with little struggle. Alas, we don't know why, but alphabetize away!

Our Alphabetizer Sort will sort your list A-Z. If there happen to be numbers mixed in there, they will be dealt with as well, in a sane and normal manner.

SORT 0-99 (Numerical Sort)

"I thought you said SORT A-Z handled numbers. Why do you have a special Numerical Sort option?" You may be asking. Well, we're glad you asked! The truth is, for any normal sort involving putting a bunch of numbers in order, than the SORT A-Z sort is quite good enough.

But ... what if your data looked like this?

How would your "Alphabetize" type of sort fare with this, do you think? We thought so! That's why we have given you SORT 0-99 (Numberical Sort) which can handle this sort of data, and do it smiling.

But we haven't told you the best part yet. Most of us deal with numbers that are large enough that we get tired of writing 0's, so we use the "K" after a number for kilo (thousands), and the 'M' after a number for Mega (millions). Occasionally, we'll even use an 'm' after a number for milli.

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understands numbers that end with 'k','K','M', and 'm'. Hopefully, this helps you more than it causes you pain. Here's a sort that

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will handle.

With the result as follows...

Pretty Neat! But a warning. Notice that we were careful to seperate our "ohm" away from our numbers with a space. If we had not done that, then the "m" from "ohm" would have made

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think "mili" and we would have sorted based on that. Any random words with "k", "K", or "M" will also, of course, cause the same problems.

If our data was, in fact, in the form 100ohm, 1.1Kohm, 0.9Mohm, etc, then, if we were clever, we'd do "Replace" of "ohm" with "ogg", THEN do our Numerical Sort, AND THEN do a replace of "ogg" back to "ohm". But, that's only if we were really clever.

SORT Mirror Items

Frankly, we don't know why you would use this sort, but we were forced, kicking and screaming, into including it, just to make it clear that Reverse Items does NOT Mirror the items, it reverses their order.

So, to make that perfectly clear, we've added SORT Mirror Items, which, as you may have guessed, does mirror the items on your list. So, if have a list of your greatest inventions that you want to scramble so nobody else can read it ...

You would end up with the following, which you could pencil safely into your notebooks for posterity.

SORT Reverse Items

This sort reverses the items themselves. Not the order they appear on your list, But instead, each item is reversed. So, for example, if the list of your son's little league team happens to look something like this ...

Then, if you chose to keep your son on such a team, which we would think twice about, you might choose to re-order them, first name, first, so your son, Aaron, could be at the front of the pack when you alphabetize it later.

No problem! Just use SORT Reverse Items, and you'll end up with this...

Then you can use "Replace" to change those commas to spaces, if you want to, but that's another topic.

SORT Reverse List

This sort just reverses your list. So, if you want reverse alphabetical, than alphabetize, and then use this sort to reverse. Any sort that you want the reverse of, just do that sort, and then do this one.

SORT Random

OK some would say that this isn't technically a sort, but sometimes you want to scramble a list, and who better to do it than

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?

This sort will scramble your list randomly. If you're not happy with the random order that it's chosen, sort it again, and you're sure to like the next random combination.

SORT Length

Sorts by length of list item. Shortest item on top, longest item on the bottom. If you want it reversed, try "Reverse Sort" after this one!

SORT 'Day of Week'

This will sort your list by the days of the week that appear within your list items. It will sort in the following order, Monday, Tuesday, ... Saturday, Sunday. For those purists who claim that Sunday should be 1st, we ask your indulgence.

A sample data set that this sort could easily handle would the the following.

As you can see, this is pretty non-structured. Even the days themselves are in multiple formats. But we'll sort it out for you with no worries.

SORT 'Month'

This will sort your list by the months that appear within your list items. It will sort in the following order, January, February, ... November, December. We're relieved to know that there's not too much controversy on this ordering.

Just like the Day of the Week, the more unstructured and messy the formatting is, the more

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likes it. Partial month names are no problem. If you have multiple list items in the same month,

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will sort based on day of the month as best it can. A sample data set that this sort could easily handle would the the following.

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handles the non-structured data and partial month names with ease.

As you can see, this is pretty non-structured. Even the months themselves are in multiple formats. But we'll sort it out for you with no worries.

SORT A-Z Titles

This will alphabetize your list of Movie Titles, Book Titles, etc. by ignoring the following words. [ A, AN, THE, LA, LE, L', Il ]

Below, you see a list that was alphabetized "normally". You see that this is not acceptable to use for a list of titles

After we execute the Title Sort, we see that it's alphabetized, but the alphabetization ignores the words listed above, and therefore, is acceptable for a list of titles.

SORT A-Z Email

This will sort your list of email addresses or your list that contains email addresses.

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looks to the right of the '@' symbol in your email addresses, and alphabetizes that. A sample data set that this sort could easily handle would the the following.

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handles the non-structured data with no problem.

SORT A-Z HREF

This will alphabetize your list of href tags by ignoring everything before the first '>' character. Very handy for web developers wishing to create an alphabetical list of links.

After we execute the sort, we see that it's alphabetized based on what the user sees, not the actual URLs the hrefs point to...

SORT Transpose List

This will transpose your list. That means your first column will become your first row, your second column will become your second row, etc.

Perhaps an example will make it clear...

After we transpose this list, we get the following...

After you transpose, you could easily delete a line of data, and then transpose it back, which effectively gives you "column delete" capability with your lists.

Replace

This implements a "Search and Replace" across all of your text. It treats your text as text, not as a list. That means you can force uncooperative data into the format that you need it, even if it wasn't well structured to begin with.

Copy

Press this button to copy all of your text to the clipboard, so you can paste it somewhere else later.

Save

Save your list to the harddrive on your computer. No copying and pasting required!

Load

Load any text file into

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from your computers harddrive. Who needs copy and paste?!

Contact Us

If you would like to contact us to suggest a sort you would like us to add, or to clarify something, or even to invite us to a party, we look forward to hearing from you.

Please email us by clicking e-mail

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