Select it and check the code point
Paste the character into the identifier on the dash symbols page: it reports U+2015 for a horizontal bar and U+2014 for an em dash.
Copy & paste · Character reference
The horizontal bar (―): the em dash you did not type
One click to copy the horizontal bar (U+2015) — visually identical to an em dash, a different character to every parser, and the usual culprit when text breaks on a paste.
Or select it by hand
Click the box to select the character, then press Ctrl + C (⌘ + C on Mac).
- Character
- Horizontal Bar
- Unicode
- U+2015
- HTML entity
- ―
- Plain-text fallback
- -
Em Dash family
The long dashes — for asides, interruptions and full-width rules.
The horizontal bar (―, U+2015) is the em dash’s invisible twin. The two characters are the same width, the same weight and, in nearly every font, pixel-for-pixel identical on screen. They are not the same character: the em dash is U+2014 and the horizontal bar is U+2015, and any software that compares strings by code point — a validator, a database index, a merge tool, a stylesheet — sees them as completely different. That is why this character causes so much confusion: you look at a sentence, you see an em dash, you search for an em dash, and you find nothing.
Unicode includes the horizontal bar for one specific job: the quotation dash. In typeset dialogue it marks a change of speaker at the start of a line, a convention that is standard in Portuguese, Spanish, Russian and a dozen other languages, and still used in some British publishing. Design tools then spread it beyond that job: InDesign, for instance, exposes it as a separate glyph and exports it from documents that never intended a quotation dash, and PDF generation pipelines occasionally substitute it for the em dash along the way. That is how it ends up in an ordinary English sentence.
If a horizontal bar is sitting in your text, the fix is the same as for any other dash: the em dash remover deletes it — the tool matches U+2015 inside its em dash family — and the remove-all-dashes tool clears it alongside everything else. If you specifically need a horizontal bar, the copy button above is the reliable way to get one, because typing it by hand is impractical and the Alt code works only on Windows. And if your goal is the opposite — a quotation dash where the dash is the point — use it deliberately, and set it up as a style rather than pasting the character into each line.
How to type a horizontal bar
Keyboard shortcuts for every platform — or skip the typing and copy the character above.
| Platform | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Windows (any app) | Alt + 8213 on the numeric keypad |
| Windows (reliable route) | charmap.exe → search “horizontal bar” or U+2015 |
| Mac | No shortcut — copy it above or use Emoji & Symbols (⌃⌘Space) |
| Google Docs | Insert → Special characters → search “horizontal bar” |
| HTML / CSS | ― or ― · content: "\2015" |
| Word | Insert → Symbol → More Symbols → search the code point |
Horizontal Bar examples
What the character looks like doing its job — and what changes if you swap in a different dash.
As a quotation dash in dialogue
― Do you remember me? ― the stranger asked.
Interchangeably with an em dash
The plan ― risky as it was ― worked.
Where the character came from a PDF
Revenue rose ― slowly ― through the quarter.
Inside a bilingual or CJK document
― それでは、始めましょう。
How to tell a horizontal bar from an em dash
You cannot do it by eye — the two glyphs are the same shape. These are the three checks that actually work.
Search for U+2014 and watch it fail
If Ctrl+H with an em dash finds nothing but you can still see a long dash, the document is using the horizontal bar — or another look-alike.
Check where the file came from
An InDesign export, a PDF conversion or a translated dialogue file are the three sources that introduce it most often.
Code points are the only reliable test, because the visual difference is zero. If you work with pasted text regularly, thedash symbols referencelists all eleven dash-like characters in one table, and theem dash removerclears both twins in a single click.
Em dash vs en dash vs hyphen
Three characters that look like each other and never behave the same way. Copy the one you need, or read the full reference for each.
Questions
Is the horizontal bar the same as an em dash?
No. The em dash is U+2014 and the horizontal bar is U+2015. They render identically in almost every font, which is exactly why they cause so much trouble: an em dash search misses a horizontal bar, a duplicate check treats two identical-looking strings as different, and a database that accepts one can reject the other.
What is the horizontal bar used for?
Its defined job is the quotation dash — the mark that opens a line of dialogue and marks a change of speaker, standard in Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Russian and many other languages. In English typesetting it is more of an accident: an InDesign glyph, a PDF conversion artefact or a substitution made upstream.
Why can I not find my em dash with find-and-replace?
Because the character in the document is probably not an em dash. Copy the dash out of the text and check its code point — if it reports U+2015 you have a horizontal bar, and a search for U+2014 will never match it. This site’s dash identifier reports what a pasted line actually contains.
How do I type a horizontal bar?
On Windows, hold Alt and type 8213 on the numeric keypad, or use the Character Map to search U+2015. On macOS there is no default shortcut — copy it from the button above or add it to a text replacement in System Settings → Keyboard → Text.
Should I replace a horizontal bar with an em dash?
In English prose, yes — an em dash is what readers and style guides expect. In dialogue formats that use the quotation dash, no: there the horizontal bar is doing real work. Decide by the convention your text follows, not by what the character looks like.
Does the horizontal bar break anything?
It breaks the same things every non-ASCII dash breaks: plain-ASCII imports, numeric parsers and strict validators, and it also defeats the find-and-replace you would use to clean up an ordinary em dash. Removing it before the data moves is the standard fix.
Horizontal bars in your text?
The em dash remover deletes U+2015 along with U+2014, so a paste that broke a validator comes back clean.
Remove em dashes and bars