Text Utilities — Reverse, Sort, Dedupe, Clean

Eight small jobs that are tedious by hand

A list pasted out of an email or a spreadsheet almost never arrives clean. Trailing spaces, blank rows, the same entry twice with slightly different spacing. Each fix is trivial to describe and maddening to do manually.

• Remove duplicate lines — keeps the first occurrence of each
• Remove empty lines
• Collapse spaces — multiple spaces or tabs become one, and line ends are trimmed
• Sort A to Z and Sort Z to A
• Reverse text — the whole string, character by character
• Reverse words — the word order, not the letters
• Remove line breaks — joins everything into one line

The order matters more than people expect

These chain, and running them in the wrong sequence silently wastes a step.

The reliable order is: remove empty lines, collapse spaces, remove duplicates, then sort.

Trimming before deduplicating is the one that catches people. If your list holds alice@example.com and alice@example.com with a trailing space, they are different strings, so the deduplicator keeps both — and it looks like it failed. Trim first and they match. Do it the other way round and the deduplication pass has quietly done nothing.

Three ways this goes wrong quietly

Deduplication is case-sensitive. Alice and alice are different strings and both survive. If your data should be matched regardless of case, normalise the case first and then deduplicate.

Sorting is alphabetical, not numeric. A text sort compares left to right, so 10 lands before 2 and 100 before 20. On a list of numeric IDs or version numbers that quietly produces a wrong order that looks sorted. Pad your numbers to equal width first if the order has to be right.

Invisible characters travel with pasted text. Copy out of a PDF or a web page and you can pick up non-breaking spaces, zero-width characters and Unicode dashes that look exactly like the ordinary ones. Two lines that appear identical then refuse to deduplicate. If that happens, the invisible character is almost always the answer — retype one of the entries by hand and see whether the pair collapses.

Why not a spreadsheet

For a one-off, this is simply faster: no file to create, no formula to write, no export, and nothing left in your downloads folder afterwards. Paste, run the operations, copy the result.

A spreadsheet wins when the job is recurring and you want the steps saved. It loses badly when you need this once, in the next minute.

Where the data goes

Nowhere. Everything runs in your browser, and the text is never uploaded. That matters here more than on most pages, because the lists people clean up are usually email addresses, customer names, phone numbers or internal identifiers — exactly the data you should not be pasting into a service that sends it to a server.

For capitalisation — upper, lower, title, sentence or the programming cases — see the text case converter.