Remove Duplicate Lines, Keep the Original Order

How to use the Remove Duplicate Lines

1. Paste your list into the Your text box — one entry per line — or press Load sample to watch it clean a short fruit list with repeats hiding in it.
2. Set the two comparison options: leave Case sensitive off to treat “Apple” and “apple” as the same line, and leave Ignore surrounding spaces on so stray spaces at the edges cannot hide a duplicate.
3. The cleaned list appears in the Result box instantly, and a note under it tells you exactly how many duplicate lines were removed and how many unique lines were kept.
4. Copy the result, or download it as a .txt file. Your original paste stays untouched in the top box, so you can change the options and compare the outcome.
5. Working with paragraphs rather than lines? Join them into lines first with the Remove Line Breaks tool, dedupe here, then split the text up again the way you need.

About this tool

Duplicate lines sneak into everything: merged spreadsheets, combined mailing lists, log files, keyword lists and survey exports. Removing them by hand means scrolling and second-guessing; this tool does it in one pass while preserving the original order of the lines that survive. It is fully adjustable — compare lines case-sensitively for code and product SKUs, or loosely for names and phrases where “Apple ” and “apple” are really the same entry. Duplicates rarely arrive one at a time where you can spot them — they arrive in bulk: two exports merged into one file, a form submitted twice, the same contacts synced from a phone and an email account, a log file that restarted and rewrote its own header lines. By the time a list is a few hundred lines long, nobody can dedupe it reliably by eye, and a spreadsheet's remove-duplicates button gives you no say in what counts as “the same”. This tool exists for that moment: paste, choose how strict to be, and read the count of what was removed before you trust the result. It pairs naturally with the other cleaners on this site. Take blank lines out first with Remove Empty Lines if your list is full of gaps, or sort the cleaned result alphabetically with Sort Lines to spot near-duplicates that differ by a single typo. And because nothing is uploaded, it is safe for the lists you would never paste into a random website — subscriber exports, order IDs, internal hostnames and the like. Working in Excel, Word or Notepad instead? The step-by-step guide to how to remove duplicate lines covers each of those, as well as the method on this page.

Worked example

The built-in sample is a short fruit list with a few repeats hiding in it: You paste (8 lines)

apple
banana
cherry
apple
date
banana
elderberry
apple

You get (5 lines)

apple
banana
cherry
date
elderberry

Three repeats are gone — the extra “apple” lines and the second “banana” — and the note under the result box confirms the count: “Removed 3 duplicate lines · 5 unique lines kept.” The surviving lines stay in their original order, so the structure of your list survives the clean-up.

Features

• Keeps the first occurrence of every line and the original order of the list — nothing is re-sorted behind your back.
• Case sensitive option: leave it off to merge lines that differ only by capitalisation (“Apple” and “apple”), or turn it on for code, SKUs and tags where case matters.
• Ignore surrounding spaces option, on by default: a line carrying stray spaces at its edges still matches its clean twin.
• Instant results as you type, with a running count of duplicates removed and unique lines kept after every change.
• Copy the cleaned list or download it as a .txt file — and your original text is never modified.
• Private by design: deduplication runs in your browser, so sensitive lists — subscribers, customers, order IDs — never leave your device.