Sort text by value in Notepad++

Question

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?

Answer 1

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

Answer 2

(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.

Answer 3

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

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

sort MyFile.txt /o MySortedFile.txt

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