And that's why I shouldn't code first thing out of bed in the morning. Of course it's doing that; I'm reusing the same input each time so changing it to a set strips out the dupe. Fixing that gives me this output:
# "12hgtjfj :: 34hytgfrd" ('bytes - before', 1048) ('before', 56, 999) ('after', 56, 999) ('sorted', 56, 999) ('bytes - after', 1054) # 21 characters, 6 bytesSo it's not the sort.
But I just noticed that my byte count increased this time!