Sort by Line Length
Sort lines by character count — shortest first or longest first. Unicode-aware.
About Sort by Line Length
This tool orders lines by their character length. By default the shortest line comes first, but you can flip the order with a single toggle. Length is measured in Unicode code points, so emoji count as one character each.
When to use it
- Producing a 'short to long' or 'long to short' inventory of items
- Finding the longest entry in a list
- Bucketing data by approximate size
- Visualizing the length distribution of a column
How it works
Lines are split on LF/CRLF, empty lines are dropped, and the array is sorted by Array.from(line).length. Ties are broken by alphabetical order.
Examples
Ascending by length
banana apple strawberry
apple banana strawberry
Frequently asked questions
- Is length measured in characters or bytes?
- Unicode code points. Emoji and most CJK characters count as one each, even though they take more than one byte in UTF-8.
- How are ties broken?
- Alphabetically. Two lines of the same length appear in alphabetical order relative to each other.