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Em dashes, en dashes and hyphens arrive mixed when documents are assembled from several sources. Pick the style you need and convert every dash at once.
A document is rarely typed by one person in one sitting. A chapter drafted in Word gains em dashes from autocorrect, a table pasted from a spreadsheet brings en dashes from a colleague’s ranges, an appendix copied out of a PDF arrives with hyphens and figure dashes nobody typed. The result reads correctly and fails a style check: three dash characters doing one job, on a page that is supposed to use one.
Converting is the fix that matches what a style guide actually asks for. “Use the em dash throughout” and “submissions must use en dashes for ranges” are instructions about the character, not the layout, and the mechanical part — finding every dash of every family and replacing it with the chosen one — is what this page does. The replacement happens in place, so the spacing around each dash is preserved: an em dash with spaces stays spaced, a tight range stays tight, and no words are joined or separated in the process.
Unlike a remover, a converter keeps a dash in every position a dash occupied. The text still reads as punctuated prose or as a range; only the character changes. That is also its limit — if the document needs real ASCII safety rather than consistency, replace all dashes or the individual replace pages will do a more honest job of it.
The ASCII-safe choice, and the one that survives every system. Converts —, – and ― to -, so 2018–2022 becomes 2018-2022 and a spaced em dash becomes a spaced hyphen. Slightly cramped in typeset prose, never wrong in data.
The plan — risky as it was — slipped. Pages 44–48.
The plan - risky as it was - slipped. Pages 44-48.
The house style of newspapers, scientific journals and most European publishing, where the en dash is the default dash and the em dash is reserved for a parenthetical break. Also the correct character for ranges, which is why converting everything to it is common in academic writing.
The plan — risky as it was — slipped. Pages 44-48.
The plan – risky as it was – slipped. Pages 44–48.
The American default, and what a reader of fiction or long-form prose expects. Use it when the document is inconsistent — some asides spaced, some tight, some typed as two hyphens — and you want one character everywhere.
The plan -- risky as it was - slipped. Pages 44-48.
The plan — risky as it was — slipped. Pages 44—48.
The third example also shows the honest limitation of a blanket conversion: an em dash does not mean “range”, so converting 2018–2022 to an em dash keeps the digits apart but changes what the mark says.
Journals, publishers and corporate templates specify the dash character, often with a rule about spacing. Converting removes the whole class of “wrong dash” comments in one pass.
Merged chapters, pasted tables, imported PDFs. Normalising the dash style is usually the first step of a cleanup, because it makes the rest of the punctuation visible.
Some publishing systems render one character beautifully and the others poorly. Converting to the character your template was designed around fixes spacing and line-breaking without touching the template.
Converting to a hyphen first, then running a remover, gives a predictable result — it is easier to decide what happens to one dash character than to three.
Converting keeps a dash where a dash was. These pages change what is there instead.
Swap every dash family for a space, a comma or nothing.
Turn the long dash into punctuation, with the style rules.
Ranges to hyphens or the word “to”, for data and prose.
Delete every dash family when a dash is unwelcome anywhere.
Every dash character, code point and entity on one page.
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