List cleaner
Convert comma-separated or line-separated values into a clean, sorted list with duplicates removed.
How to use list cleaner
Half-finished lists arrive comma-separated, line-separated, or both at once, with duplicates and stray spaces mixed in. This tool accepts any mixture and returns one clean list in the shape you choose.
- 1Paste the list in whatever shape it is in
Commas, semicolons, line breaks, or all three in the same paste — every one of them counts as an item boundary, and each item is trimmed of surrounding spaces. Empty entries left by doubled commas vanish on their own.
- 2Choose sorting, deduplication, and the output shape
Sort A to Z orders items alphabetically, ignoring case. Remove duplicates keeps each entry once, matching case-insensitively and preserving the first spelling it saw. Output format returns the result one per line, comma-separated, or semicolon-separated.
- 3Clean, then reuse the list anywhere
Select Clean text. One per line suits spreadsheets and the other line tools; comma-separated drops straight into prose, tag fields, and code. The swap button between the panels moves the result back to the input for a second pass with different settings.
When this tool is useful
The small decisions it makes for you
Splitting is deliberately liberal: any run of commas, semicolons, and line breaks counts as a single boundary. That is what lets a list assembled from three sources — one pasted line by line, one comma-separated, one ending every item with a semicolon — come out uniform without any manual preparation.
Deduplication is case-insensitive and keeps the first occurrence’s exact spelling, so "Pear, Apple, banana, apple" yields Apple once, capitalised as it first appeared. Sorting compares case-insensitively too and is locale-aware, so accented entries land where a reader expects rather than being exiled past z.
Because a comma always splits, an entry that legitimately contains one — "Smith, John" — becomes two items here. For line-based data with embedded commas, remove duplicate lines and sort lines work strictly line by line and leave inner punctuation alone.
List cleaner questions
Yes — commas, semicolons, and line breaks are all treated as item boundaries, in any combination. That is the point of the tool: normalising a list that arrived in several shapes at once.
The first one encountered. "Pear, Apple, banana, apple" keeps Apple with its capital A because that spelling came first, and the later lowercase copy is dropped.
Alphabetically, because list items are compared as text — so "10" sorts before "2". For genuinely numeric ordering, output one per line and use sort lines, whose Number mode compares by value.
Comma-splitting is built in here, so entries like "Smith, John" cannot survive it. Use the line-based tools instead — remove duplicate lines and sort lines treat each line as one unit and never split on inner punctuation.
Paste the column, set Output format to Comma-separated, untick Sort A to Z if the original order matters, and clean. Deduplication on the way through is one more checkbox.