Sort Lines Longest First — Descending Length Sort
Sort text lines from longest to shortest instantly — order lists by descending character count in one click. Free, client-side length sorter tool.
🔒 100% Client-Side Processing
Your data is processed entirely in your browser and never transmitted to any server.
Input
apple
fig
banana Output
banana
apple
fig Ordered by character count, longest first — 6, then 5, then 3. Lines of equal length keep the order you pasted them in.
Common Use Cases
Finding the longest entries
Surface the longest URLs, log lines or page titles instantly, so you can check them against a length budget without scanning the whole list.
Ordering replacement rules
Sort search patterns longest-first so that broader matches are applied before shorter substrings, which would otherwise consume part of a longer term and corrupt it.
Spotting outliers in a column
Pull the extremes of a pasted data column to the top, which is usually where malformed rows and unexpected concatenations reveal themselves.
Prioritising truncation work
See which strings will be cut first when a display limit is applied, so the worst offenders can be rewritten before anything ships.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What does descending length order mean?
- The longest line comes first and the shortest last, measured in characters rather than words. Only length matters — alphabetical order is ignored entirely, so two completely unrelated lines of the same width end up adjacent. For alphabetical ordering, use Sort Lines instead.
- Why does longest-first matter for find-and-replace?
- Because a short pattern can match inside a longer one. If you replace "cat" before "catalogue", the longer term is corrupted before its own rule ever runs. Applying the longest patterns first means every replacement consumes the most specific match available, which is why rule lists are conventionally sorted this way.
- Are lines of equal length kept in their original order?
- Yes. The sort is stable, which JavaScript has guaranteed since ES2019, so lines that tie on length appear in the order you pasted them. That makes the result predictable and repeatable — running the same input twice can never shuffle the ties differently.
- Does whitespace count toward the length?
- Yes. Leading and trailing spaces, tabs and any other whitespace are ordinary characters here, so a line of four spaces sorts above a line reading "ab". Trim your input first if you want the ordering to reflect visible content rather than raw character count.
- Why did my Windows text sort strangely?
- Lines are split on the newline character alone, so a Windows carriage return stays attached to the end of each line and adds one to its measured length — every line except the last. Near-ties can flip as a result. Convert to Unix line endings first, or sort the text somewhere that has already normalised them. For the opposite order, see Sort Lines by Length.
- Is my data private when I use this tool?
- Yes. This tool runs entirely in your browser using client-side JavaScript — nothing you type is transmitted to, logged by, or stored on any server. You can safely process confidential text, tokens, or code.