Em Dash Remover

How to use

1. 1Paste your text into the Input area on the left. Try a Sample button to see how a typical AI paragraph or year range is handled.
2. 2Pick a replacement under Replace each dash with. Comma works best for AI-generated copy; use Spaced hyphen for an ASCII-only output.
3. 3Under Which dashes to replace, toggle on every dash class you want changed. Em dash, horizontal bar, double hyphen, and triple hyphen are on by default; en dash and minus stay off so number ranges survive.
4. 4Read the cleaned text on the right and watch the per-class counts. Click Copy output to send the result to your clipboard or Replace input with output to iterate.

About this tool

Em Dash Remover replaces or deletes the em dash (U+2014) and related long-dash characters in any text you paste. It is built for the common workflow of cleaning AI-generated copy, since ChatGPT and other large language models lean heavily on em dashes as sentence joiners and the long dash is one of the most recognizable tells of unedited model output. The tool detects every dash class independently: em dash (U+2014), en dash (U+2013), horizontal bar (U+2015), figure dash (U+2012), minus sign (U+2212), the Markdown double hyphen shortcut, and the triple hyphen long-dash shortcut. Each class has its own toggle so a year range like 2025 to 2026 written with an en dash can stay untouched while every em dash is replaced. Replacement modes cover the most-asked-for fixes: comma plus space (the natural default for AI text where the dash acts like a comma), semicolon plus space, spaced ASCII hyphen, the word or with surrounding spaces, period plus space to split the sentence in two, a single space, full removal, or a custom string you provide. The replacement engine absorbs the whitespace around each detected dash so patterns like word(dash)word, word (dash) word, word(dash) word, and word (dash)word all produce a clean result without stranded double spaces or leftover punctuation. Live counts show every dash class found in the input and how many of each were replaced under your current scope. Useful for editing AI-written essays and blog posts, normalizing pasted prose from Microsoft Word and Google Docs, preparing copy for SEO meta tags that need plain ASCII, stripping long dashes from CSV cells before database import, and matching house-style guides that mandate no em dashes. All processing runs locally in your browser, so the text you paste is never uploaded to a server.

Free to use. Works in your browser. No signup, no login.