Sort numbers

What it's for

It puts back in order, from smallest to largest, every number it finds in the pasted text: amounts copied from a bank statement, measurements taken on the fly, marks, results, stock quantities. It helps when the numbers arrived in a jumble and, before doing anything with them, you need to see the smallest, the largest and the gaps in between, without opening a spreadsheet.

How the numbers are read

Numbers are recognized inside the text, so you can paste the sentences around them too: words are ignored. One per line, separated by spaces, commas or semicolons: every way works.

The delicate part is the separator, because in Italy and Spain the comma separates decimals and the dot separates thousands, while in English it's the other way round. The rule used here recognizes both: if a number has two different separators, the one grouping digits in threes marks the thousands and the other is the decimal (1.234,56 and 1,234.56 are both 1234.56); if it has only one, that's the decimal (12,50 and 3.14); and commas that don't form groups of three stay what they look like, separators between one number and the next (1,2,3 are three numbers).

What it does NOT do

It doesn't remove duplicates: if a number appears twice in the text, it appears twice in the sorted list too, because in a list of amounts duplicates are real data and not mistakes. And it doesn't add anything up: if besides the order you need the total, the average, the smallest and the largest, the page is Sum a list of numbers.

Nearby tools

To sort lines of text instead of numbers there is Sort lines, and to sort them from shortest to longest Sort lines by length. If the numbers are inside a table copied out of a PDF, it's worth putting it back into columns first with Extract tables from a PDF.