Em Dash Remover

Replace em dashes (—) with commas, hyphens, or periods — or remove them entirely. Counts every dash. Runs in your browser.

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What Is an Em Dash?

An em dash (—, U+2014) is a punctuation mark roughly the width of the letter “M”. Writers use it to set off parenthetical phrases, mark interruptions, or replace colons. It is different from the en dash (–, U+2013), used for ranges like “pages 10–25”, and the plain hyphen (-), used to join words.

Why Remove Em Dashes?

House style — many style guides prefer commas, parentheses, or periods over em dashes, or require spaced en dashes instead.
Plain-text environments — em dashes can render inconsistently in terminals, code comments, CSV files, and legacy systems that expect ASCII.
Editing AI-drafted text— text generated by writing assistants often leans heavily on em dashes. If the punctuation density doesn't match your voice, normalizing the dashes is a quick cleanup step.
Data processing — when text feeds into slugs, IDs, or search indexes, typographic dashes cause mismatches that plain hyphens avoid.

How This Tool Works

Paste your text and pick a replacement strategy. The tool counts every em dash (including the horizontal bar ― and two/three-em dashes) and rewrites them in one pass:

Comma: results — far beyond hopes — came in → results, far beyond hopes, came in
Hyphen: word — word → word - word
Period: splits the clause into two sentences and capitalizes the next word
Space / Remove: for minimal cleanup

Toggle Also en dashes to normalize range dashes in the same pass. Everything runs locally in your browser — no text is uploaded.

Em Dash vs En Dash vs Hyphen

Mark	Unicode	Typical use
Em dash (—)	U+2014	Breaks in thought, parenthetical phrases
En dash (–)	U+2013	Ranges (2010–2020), connections (Boston–London)
Hyphen (-)	U+002D	Compound words, URL slugs, code

FAQ

Does this change my text in any other way?

No. Only dash characters are touched. Quotes, spacing elsewhere, and all other punctuation stay exactly as you pasted them.

Is my text sent to a server?

No. All processing happens locally in your browser. Your text never leaves your device.

Related Tools

Need broader cleanup? The Plain Text Converter strips HTML, smart quotes, and invisible characters in one pass. Check for hidden Unicode with the Invisible Character Detector, or turn clean text into URL slugs with the URL Slug Generator.