Em Dash Remover

What this tool does

The em dash (U+2014) is a long dash used to interrupt a sentence, add an aside or mark a sudden turn. It is a perfectly good punctuation mark, but many people need text without it. Some editors and style guides prefer commas or brackets. Some platforms show it as a strange symbol. And with AI writing tools using it heavily, plenty of writers now remove it so their text reads more like their own.

This tool finds every em dash in your text and replaces it with the punctuation you choose. It does the same for the shorter en dash (U+2013), and it turns dashes in number ranges into plain hyphens.

How to use it

1. Paste your text into Your text. The cleaned version appears under Text without em dashes.
2. Under Replace each dash with, pick Comma, Semicolon, Spaced hyphen, Hyphen or Space.
3. Check the options: Include en dashes, Number ranges become hyphens and Also replace double hyphens.
4. Press Copy or Download.

The note under the tool tells you how many dashes were replaced.

The replacement choices

Comma is the default because it fits most sentences. A pair of em dashes around an aside works like a pair of commas. Any spaces around the dash are removed first, so you get one clean comma and one space. If the next character is already punctuation, such as a full stop, no extra comma is added.

Semicolon suits a dash that joins two complete thoughts.

Spaced hyphen puts a normal keyboard hyphen with a space on each side. This is the closest look to the original, using only characters found on every keyboard.

Hyphen joins the words with a hyphen and no spaces.

Space simply replaces the dash with a space.

Examples

In this table, [em dash] and [en dash] stand for the real characters.

The same first sentence with the other choices:

Which characters are replaced

• Em dash (U+2014), always.
• Horizontal bar (U+2015) and the two-em and three-em dashes (U+2E3A and U+2E3B), which look similar and are treated the same way.
• En dash (U+2013) and figure dash (U+2012), when Include en dashes is on.
• Two or three hyphens in a row between words, when Also replace double hyphens is on. Many people type -- when they mean an em dash, and some programs turn it into one automatically.

With Number ranges become hyphens on, a dash between two digits, such as in 1990 to 1995 written with an en dash, becomes a hyphen with no spaces, whatever replacement you chose.

Tips and limits

• Read the result. A comma is right most of the time, but not always. A dash before a list or an explanation might read better as a colon, and a dash that ends a sentence abruptly might need a full stop. Fix those few by hand.
• Keep paired dashes paired. If a sentence has two dashes around an aside, both become commas, which keeps it balanced.
• Other smart punctuation such as curly quotes and ellipsis characters can be cleaned with the plain text converter.
• One-off swaps of any word or symbol are easy with the find and replace tool.
• Removing all symbols at once, not just dashes, is what the special character remover does.

How to type or avoid em dashes

Word processors often insert em dashes for you. Microsoft Word turns two hyphens between words into a dash as you type. To stop it, open File, Options, Proofing, AutoCorrect Options, then the AutoFormat As You Type tab, and clear the option that replaces hyphens with a dash. Google Docs has a similar setting under Tools, then Preferences, under Automatic substitution.

To remove existing dashes in Word, open Find and Replace, put ^+ in the Find box (Word’s code for an em dash) and type a comma and a space in the Replace box. Use ^= for en dashes. In Google Docs, paste the dash into the Find box of Find and replace.

In code, a regular expression does the job. In JavaScript, text.replace(/\s*\u2014\s*/g, ', ') replaces each em dash and its surrounding spaces with a comma and a space. In Python, use re.sub(r'\s*\u2014\s*', ', ', text).