Em dash remover
Paste your text and every em dash (—) and en dash (–) is replaced with your choice — a plain hyphen, a spaced hyphen, a comma, or removed entirely. Instant, free, and nothing you paste leaves your browser.
About this tool
Em dashes creep into text from word processors that auto-convert double hyphens, from style-heavy editors, and from AI writing assistants that lean on them hard. That’s fine for prose — less fine when a style guide, a form field, a CMS, or a code file expects plain punctuation. This tool finds every dash variant (em dash, en dash, horizontal bar, figure dash, and six hyphen lookalikes), shows you where each one was, and normalizes them in one pass. Use the replace with menu in the options panel to pick what dashes become, and toggle the other fixes — smart quotes, hidden characters, unusual spaces — on or off as needed.
Questions, answered
How do I remove em dashes from AI-generated text?
Paste the text into the box above. Every em dash is flagged in the Findings tab and replaced in the Cleaned tab — choose a spaced hyphen (the default), a comma, a tight hyphen, or full removal from the 'replace with' menu. Number ranges like 2024–2026 automatically get a tight hyphen so they stay ranges.
What's the difference between an em dash, an en dash, and a hyphen?
A hyphen (-) joins words, an en dash (–) marks ranges like 2024–2026, and an em dash (—) sets off clauses. They're three different Unicode characters, which is why find-and-replace often misses them — this tool catches all of them plus lookalikes.
Will it change my quotes and other punctuation too?
By default it also straightens smart quotes and normalizes ellipses and odd spaces, since they usually travel together. Every fix is a toggle in the options panel, so you can limit it to dashes only.
All tools
Same engine, tuned starting points: