Alphabetizer Tool

Alphabetising a list is one of those operations that seems trivial until you try to do it by hand on anything longer than a screen. Beyond speed, the real payoff is that a stable order makes a list diffable: two sorted versions of the same list can be compared line by line, so you can see exactly what was added or removed between revisions. Unsorted, that comparison is guesswork.

Sorted order also makes anomalies jump out. Entries with a stray leading space sort to the top, entries with inconsistent capitalisation cluster oddly, and near-duplicates land adjacent to each other where they are impossible to miss. Running a sort before a deduplication pass, rather than after, means you catch the variants that a strict duplicate check would let through.

The one thing to watch is what "alphabetical" means. Plain code-point ordering puts all uppercase letters before all lowercase, so Zebra sorts before apple — rarely what anyone wants. Locale-aware collation handles case and accents the way a human dictionary would, but the correct answer varies by language: Swedish orders ä after z while German orders it with a. If your list is multilingual or user-facing, confirm the order against the locale you are publishing in before shipping it.