How to Clean Up a Text List: Remove Duplicates, Blank Lines, and Sort

An email list from a CRM, a column exported from Excel, a server log, SEO keywords — sooner or later any list like this turns into a mess: duplicates, random order, stray blank lines. Fixing it by hand in a text editor is slow and tedious. Here are five tools that each solve one specific text-cleanup task, right in your browser, with no file upload to a server.

Remove duplicate lines

If duplicates crept into a list — say, you merged a few exports or copied the data twice — the duplicate line remover keeps only the unique lines. You can compare lines case-insensitively, ignore leading/trailing whitespace, and choose which occurrence to keep: the first or the last (handy when the more recent version of a line matters more).

Sort the lines

Sort lines arranges a list alphabetically or by numeric value, ascending or descending. Numeric mode fixes something plain alphabetical sorting usually gets wrong: without it, "10" ends up before "2"; with it, numbers land in the correct order.

Remove blank lines

Text copied from a PDF or Word document almost always drags along extra line breaks. Remove blank lines works in two modes: strip every blank line entirely, or just collapse runs of several blank lines in a row into one, preserving paragraph breaks.

Number the lines

When you need not just a list but a numbered sequence — for an instruction guide, for discussing lines of code with colleagues, for printing — line numbering helps. Set the starting number, the separator after it (period, parenthesis, colon, tab), whether to skip blank lines, and whether to zero-pad the numbers.

Find and replace

When you need to fix more than a single word — say, swap an old domain for a new one across an entire list of links, or reformat dates into a consistent shape — find and replace is the tool. Plain mode looks for an exact substring with "case sensitive" and "whole word only" options. Regex mode accepts an arbitrary pattern, flags, and capture groups in the replacement ($1, $2) to rearrange parts of the text.

Combining the tools

Each tool solves one problem, so cleaning up a list fully usually means running them one after another: remove duplicates first, then strip blank lines, then sort the result. Copy the output of one step, paste it into the next tool. All five run entirely in the browser — the text is never sent anywhere, which also makes them fine for sensitive data like customer lists or internal logs.