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Em Dash Remover

Replace em dashes (—) with commas, periods or hyphens, and turn curly quotes, ellipsis characters and hidden spaces into plain ones. Handy for text from AI assistants, which use a lot of em dashes.

Runs in your browser · No uploads

Pairs of dashes around an aside ("the plan—if it works—is good") always become commas.

Cleaned text

The cleaned text appears here, with every change marked.

  • Nothing leaves your device
  • No server-imposed size limits
  • No sign-up, no watermark
  • Free

How to remove em dashes

  1. Paste your text.
  2. Choose what replaces a long dash, and what else to clean.
  3. Copy the cleaned text. Every change is marked, and you can hover over it to see what was there.

Smart replacements

  • A pair of dashes around an aside ("the plan—if it works—is good") becomes a pair of commas: "the plan, if it works, is good".
  • A single dash becomes your choice: a comma, a period (the next word gets a capital letter), a semicolon, a colon, a spaced hyphen, a spaced en dash, or a space.
  • A dash at the start of a line, like "— Mark Twain", becomes "- Mark Twain". A dash at the end of a sentence is simply removed.
  • Dashes in ranges ("2010–2020", "pages 4–9") become hyphens, or "to" between numbers.
  • Spaced en dashes ( – ) and double hyphens ( -- ) used as dashes are treated the same way.

Also cleans

  • Curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’) into straight quotes (" ').
  • The ellipsis character (…) into three periods.
  • Non-breaking spaces into normal spaces, and zero-width characters removed.
  • Bullet characters (•) into hyphens, if you want.

Why remove em dashes?

Em dashes are correct punctuation, but AI chat assistants use them so often that many readers now take them as a sign of generated text. Replacing most of them with commas or periods makes text read more like a person wrote it. For other telltale words, try the AI Phrase Finder.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between an em dash and an en dash?

The em dash (—) is the long one used in sentences. The en dash (–) is for ranges like 2010–2020. The hyphen (-) joins words like "well-known".

Will this make AI text undetectable?

No. It only changes punctuation. AI detectors look at many things, and none of them is reliable. Write in your own words.

Is my text uploaded?

No. It is cleaned in your browser.