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I have lists of files that contain a few columns of data. It is not sorted the way I want from the output, so I'm manually hunting for where a line should be. Is there a way in Notepad++ to sort the lines alphabetically? If so, how?

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3 Answers 3

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Since Notepad++ 6.5.2 it is now natively possible to sort lines:

Version v6.9.2 (as of 8/5/16)

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  • 2
    note that any capital comes before a lower case. ie. A-Z then a-z
    – Aequitas
    Jun 14, 2015 at 0:05
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    Thanks for including a screenshot! This other post (superuser.com/questions/762279/…) is good, but it is very clear from your screenshot what to do.
    – Eric Hepperle - CodeSlayer2010
    Nov 7, 2015 at 19:55
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    It worked! This should be the accepted answer.
    – Peter Mortensen
    Jun 13, 2016 at 10:57
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    This is buggy... I had to copy my text and paste into another tab to be able to sort...
    – Rosdi
    Sep 8, 2016 at 6:56
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    I saw some problem with sorts, I think it can be linked with inconsistent line endings. One solution that helped me to solve the "non-sorting" issue was : Select all text, convert all line endings to Linux/Mac/Windows (whichever is NOT your operating system), then convert all line-endings to your operating system ending. Now It worked fine for me at this point.
    – Pacopaco
    Jun 5, 2018 at 10:27
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(Note that this answer was written before np++ 6.5.2 released.)

It seems that Notepad++ doesn't support sorting by default, but Notepad++ has many friends to do something like that for you which we call plugins.

  1. Download TextFX plugin for Notepad++ ( TextFX in SourceForge ) - go to the latest version and download the latest TextFX…bin.zip.
  2. Open the zip and extract NppTextFX.dll to (Program Files)\Notepad++\plugins folder.
  3. Restart Notepad++
  4. To do the sort, select lines to sort, go to TextFX on the main menu and select TextFX Tools - Sort lines.
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  • No need to grab TextFX manually -> First: Update to newest version of NPP. Then pick "Plugins" / "Plugin Manager". It should then populate plugin list. Pick TextFX. "Install". Done.
    – B. Shea
    Aug 16, 2017 at 16:25
  • Also, native sorting has improved over the years. (Pick "Edit"/"Line Operations") See other answers if you don't want to bother w/ TextFX plugin, though, I recommend it for other reasons..
    – B. Shea
    Aug 16, 2017 at 16:27
  • The plugin is now called "TextFX Characters".
    – Alek Davis
    Nov 9, 2017 at 23:27
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Since you are using Notepad++, I assume you are using Windows. You have a few other options to sort large text file content alphabetically.

My personal favorite is PowerShell. You could use the Sort-Object cmdlet. The following command shows an example of how to use the cmdlet. We first read the content (Get-Content) of MyFile.txt, pass it to the Sort-Object cmdlet (Sort) and output the result into a new file (Out-File).

Get-Content MyFile.txt | Sort | Out-File MySortedFile.txt

enter image description here

Another option is to use the sort command in the Command Prompt.

sort MyFile.txt /o MySortedFile.txt

enter image description here

Finally, the last option is to use an online tool: miniwebtool.com or sortlines.com will do the job.

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