Text files are probably the simplest types of files to handle text content. The problem is that while they are simple to handle, there are not very many options to handle the text inside.

Say you have a list of items in a plain text file and you wanted to sort them alphabetically. There is no way you can do that opening the file in either Notepad or Wordpad. You could workaround the problem by importing the text file into an Excel file or any other spreadsheet application, sort it, and export the file back to the text format.

But that is way too much work for getting such a simple task done and what if the computer you are working on does not have a spreadsheet application installed. Sortmylist.com is a free online tool that can help you manipulate your plain text data in several ways. There is no registration or login involved. Just go to sortmylist.com and you can start using the tool. The tool has an intuitive help built into it. Just place your mouse pointer on any of the choices available and on the right side you will see a short description of what that choice would do and a simple example illustrating the effect of the choice.

Sortmylist lets you sort lists in various ways, like alphabetical sort, name sort, address sort, email sort, href sort etc. And it does quite a smart job of sorting them. For instance, while sorting email Ids, it sorts them by the domain name so that emails belonging to the same domain are grouped together. Similarly, HREFs are alphabetized by what the user sees and not what the URL is.

Before you begin to sort any list, remember to select the separator or delimiter that separates each item in your list. You can choose from the most commonly used separators like comma, new line, space, tab etc or you could choose a custom separator. While sorting is one of the stronger points of Sortmylist, it can do a few other tasks too, like changing the case of the text and cleaning up the text. Cleaning up includes, removing non-alphanumeric characters, white-spaces, duplicates etc.

In fine, sortmylist.com could be a very useful tool when you want to manipulate text.