A PDF or InDesign export
Publishing tools and print pipelines sometimes map a rule or a quotation dash to U+2015. Copy a paragraph out of the PDF and the character comes with it.
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Horizontal bar remover — fix the dash that is not an em dash
U+2015 looks exactly like an em dash and behaves like nothing else. Paste the text and turn every one of them into a real em dash, a hyphen, or nothing.
Dash remover tool
The horizontal bar (―, U+2015) is a separate Unicode character from the em dash, and on screen the two are indistinguishable in most fonts. The difference is what software does with them. An em dash (U+2014) is the character editors, style guides and word processors mean by “dash”, and it is the one your keyboard shortcut, your autocorrect and your typography settings produce. The horizontal bar is the alternative a handful of typesetting traditions prefer for quoted dialogue, and the one several publishing pipelines emit without being asked.
Because they look identical, nobody notices one is in the text until something rejects it. A form validator with an ASCII or a small character whitelist refuses it. A style checker flags it as an inconsistency against the em dashes elsewhere in the same document. A find-and-replace for “—” reports no matches on text that visibly contains one. And in a font that never drew U+2015, the character renders as an empty rectangle — the box that sends people looking for “why is my em dash a box”.
This tool removes exactly that character and leaves genuine em dashes, en dashes and hyphens alone. The default replacement is a real em dash, which is what most people actually want: same appearance, same meaning, but a character that every tool agrees on. Choose Hyphen if the destination is a code field or a slug, or Nothing if the bar was decoration — a rule, a separator, an unwanted divider line — rather than punctuation.
Where the character comes from
Nobody types U+2015 on purpose. It arrives from a document, a pipeline or a font.
Quotation dashes in dialogue
Some house styles open dialogue with a dash instead of quotation marks, and specify the horizontal bar for the job. If a manuscript follows that style, every one of those dashes is U+2015.
A font substitution
A document opened on a machine without the original font can have its em dashes rewritten by a fallback that uses the horizontal bar — the glyph looks right, the character does not.
Automated text cleanup
Scrapers, OCR passes and older CMS platforms normalise punctuation with their own mapping tables, and some of those tables write U+2015 where the source had U+2014.
Pick the replacement
The right one depends on whether the bar was punctuation, a separator or a rule.
Em Dash
Prose and documentsThe right answer almost every time. Identical appearance, and every editor, validator and chatbot agrees on what it is.
Hyphen
Slugs, code and dataASCII and universally accepted. Use it when the text has to survive a spreadsheet, a URL or a database field.
Blank space
A bar used as a separatorWhen the character divided two labels rather than punctuating a sentence, a space is what the line actually wanted.
Nothing
Rules and dividersDelete it outright when the bar was a decorative rule — a horizontal line of dashes standing in for a section break.
Whichever you pick, it applies to the whole paste in one pass — a single chapter, a whole manuscript or a spreadsheet column. Nothing is uploaded and there is no word limit, so a page of cases is as safe as one sentence.
Related dash tools
The horizontal bar is one of several dashes that are not the em dash you expected.
What Is a Horizontal Bar?
The character, its code point, and why it breaks validators.
Em Dash Remover
Take out real em dashes instead of converting to them.
Multi-Em Dash Remover
Fix the two- and three-em dashes that show as empty boxes.
Convert Dashes
Turn every dash in the text into one consistent style.
Non-Breaking Hyphen Remover
Take out U+2011 so pasted numbers search and import again.
All Dash Symbols
Compare all 11 dash characters side by side with their code points.
Questions
What is a horizontal bar, and how is it different from an em dash?
The horizontal bar is U+2015 and the em dash is U+2014. They usually render identically, but they are different code points with different Unicode properties, so a program comparing characters or validating against a whitelist treats them as two unrelated things.
Why does my em dash show as an empty box?
Because the character is not the em dash your font has a glyph for. U+2015 is missing from a surprising number of fonts, and the missing-glyph box is what you see. The two- and three-em dashes are missing even more often. Converting the character to a real em dash fixes the display everywhere.
Is converting it to an em dash safe?
For prose, yes — the glyph is the same and the meaning is the same. The only place the distinction matters is a publication that deliberately uses U+2015 for dialogue, which is why the tool lets you pick a hyphen, a space or deletion instead.
Why does find and replace not find it?
Because you are searching for U+2014 and the document holds U+2015 — two strings that look the same in the search box and never match. Searching for the em dash character is the most common way people discover this problem: zero results on a page full of dashes.
Can it break a JSON file, CSV or API request?
It can. JSON forbids literal control characters and some validators reject non-ASCII outside strings; CSV loaders and older APIs often assume a single-byte encoding and mangle anything above U+007F. A horizontal bar in the middle of a value is a plausible cause of a failed import that looks like a mysterious encoding bug.
Will this page also remove two- and three-em dashes?
No — this page is locked to U+2015 and nothing else, so real em dashes are never collateral damage. The multi-em dashes (U+2E3A and U+2E3B) have their own page, and Remove All Dashes clears every family at once.
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