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March 15

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Is there a site (or another free resource) where I could paste a list of a few hundred words and have them ordered alphabetically? It may be more difficult but I'd also like to find a similar way to list them by the number of their letters (such as: cat, dog, bear, bird, horse, giraffe, leopard...). Do you have any idea? Thank you! --79.35.50.40 (talk) 19:26, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Does installing Python count as a resource? This would be trivially easy to do in Python: here's how to sort a list alphabetically in Python. You can actually use that page as a resource (click "Try it Yourself"), if you can put your list in the right format. To sort by length instead, change the code by replacing sort() with sort(key=len). If you actually install Python it could open a text file and read it line by line, very easily, which saves you having to format it as a Python list ["I", "mean", "like", "this"].
I just tried that site with about 250 words, and it works:
You might want the output to be formatted in a more useful way though. (This is fixable.) I also notice that it's sorting capital letters separately from lower case, which might not be the desired behavior: that would take another tweak to fix (change it to say sort(key=str.lower)).
For nicer output (a comma separated list): instead of print(thislist), put print(", ".join(thislist)).
 Card Zero  (talk) 20:00, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have a spreadsheet program? With MS Excel and LibreOffice Calc you can paste a list into a column of cells then sort it, then copy it back out again.
Added: And they have formulae for counting letters, so you can sort by length as well.--Verbarson talkedits 21:11, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
And LibreOffice is of course free. (I can't see anything in the Calc docs about counting letters, but I'm not used to spreadsheets.)  Card Zero  (talk) 21:25, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
LEN(text) --Verbarson talkedits 23:46, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Oh yes. That works. So the only remaining question (assuming the OP is like me and knows nothing of spreadsheets) is how to populate column B with =LEN(A1), =LEN(A2), etc., automatically, so that it can be used as the sort key. (It's about time I learned this myself.)  Card Zero  (talk) 00:13, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
If cell B1 holds =LEN(A1), then copying it down the column will automatically create B2 =LEN(A2), B3 =LEN(A3). You can usually copy one cell (B1) into a range (eg B2 - B250) as a single action. --Verbarson talkedits 10:48, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks. In Calc the action is to click the tiny square handle in the bottom-right corner of the cell, and drag down the column. I learned a skill! Hope the OP got something out of this too.  Card Zero  (talk) 11:54, 16 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
In the days of command-line operating systems, sort commands came standard with the operating system; see sort (Unix) for Unix (there was also a sort command that came with MS-DOS). AnonMoos (talk) 23:00, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I just tried the sort command in a Windows cmd prompt (run->cmd) and it worked. (I did sort<test.txt>test2.txt to turn the file test.txt into the alphabetized file test2.txt.) Doesn't offer an easy way to sort by length, though. Maybe Powershell can sort strings by length? ... yes, I tested and it can! "Get-Content -Path [path] | Sort-Object Length" is the command, where [path] should be replaced with the path to where the unsorted file (one word per line) resides, e.g. C:\Users\yourname\test.txt. This will print the words, sorted by length, to the screen, where they can be copied by selecting and right-clicking. (To open Powershell, it's right-click start menu, run, then type "Powershell".)  Card Zero  (talk) 23:18, 15 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]