A lookup returns nothing
The value looks identical on screen, and a VLOOKUP, a SQL WHERE clause or a deduplication check treats it as a different string. Non-breaking hyphens are a frequent culprit in “the value is definitely there” bugs.
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Non-breaking hyphen remover — turn U+2011 back into a hyphen
A non-breaking hyphen looks exactly like the one on your keyboard and refuses to behave like it. This tool converts every one of them to a plain hyphen, a space, or nothing.
Dash remover tool
The non-breaking hyphen (‑, U+2011) was added to Unicode for one job: joining the parts of something that must never be split across a line — 555-0134, AN-4471-B, Jean-Pierre, 2-4-17. It renders like a normal hyphen in every font, so the two are impossible to tell apart on screen, and they are different characters to every program that compares strings. That is the whole problem: text that looks correct and fails to match.
It gets into your data through a paste. Word inserts it with Ctrl + Shift + - and Google Docs offers it under Special characters; InDesign, LaTeX and typesetting pipelines emit it automatically where a break would be harmful; and a PDF or web page that used it hands it straight to your clipboard. From there it travels into a spreadsheet, a support ticket, a customer record — and then a lookup for “555-0134” returns nothing while the record sits on screen looking exactly like the value you searched for.
This tool replaces exactly U+2011, so ordinary hyphens, en dashes and em dashes are untouched. The default replacement is the plain ASCII hyphen, which is what you want for anything a machine will read: the number still reads as a phone number, sorts with the rest of the column, and matches what people type. Choose a space when the hyphen was only separating two words, and Nothing to delete it — useful when the parts were never meant to be joined in the first place.
What the character breaks
The symptoms are all the same shape: text that looks right and does not match.
A sort puts rows in odd places
U+2011 sorts after ASCII digits and letters rather than with the hyphen, so a pasted batch of identifiers can land at the bottom of a column instead of next to its neighbours.
A validator rejects the field
Phone-number and postcode validators, older APIs and CSV loaders usually allow only ASCII. A non-breaking hyphen inside a field is an invalid character with no visible cause.
A line will not break
The character’s whole purpose: in a narrow column a long part number can push the layout wide or overflow, because the hyphen refuses to be a break point. If that is the behaviour you want to keep, keep the character.
Choose the replacement
Hyphen
Data, numbers, identifiersThe default and the safe answer. ASCII, one byte, recognised by every system, and it still reads as a phone number or a code to a human.
Blank space
Words that were joinedUse it when the character sat between words rather than digits — a hyphenated pair that should be two words after all.
Nothing
A separator that should goDeletes the character so the two halves fuse. That is what a slug, an account key or a username wants.
One rule applies to the whole paste, so a column of a thousand values is the same job as a single line. Paste it in, copy the clean column back out — there is no upload and no row limit.
Related dash tools
Three different hyphens in Unicode, three different jobs — pick the page that matches the one in your text.
What Is a Non-Breaking Hyphen?
How to type one in Word and Docs, and when to keep it.
Soft Hyphen Remover
The other invisible hyphen — remove U+00AD from PDF paste.
Replace Hyphen
Swap ordinary hyphens for spaces, underscores or nothing.
Horizontal Bar Remover
Fix the U+2015 dash that shows as an empty box.
Remove All Dashes
Clear every dash family in one pass, visible or not.
Questions
How is a non-breaking hyphen different from a normal hyphen?
The normal hyphen is U+002D, the key on your keyboard, one byte of ASCII. The non-breaking hyphen is U+2011, a separate Unicode character with the same appearance whose only special property is that a line must not break at it. Same glyph, different code point, different behaviour everywhere else.
How can I tell whether my text has one?
Paste it into the tool above: the counter reports how many U+2011 characters were found. In Word, Show/Hide formatting (Ctrl + Shift + 8) draws the non-breaking hyphen slightly differently from an ordinary one. In a browser, pasting into a search box and searching for the value with a typed hyphen is the quickest test — no match means the characters differ.
Why did my phone number stop matching in Excel?
Because the number was pasted from a source that used U+2011, and Excel compares characters rather than glyphs. Replace the character with a plain hyphen in the source data, or use SUBSTITUTE(A1, UNICHAR(8209), "-") to normalise the column in place.
Will replacement change how the text looks?
No. The two characters are drawn almost identically in every common font, so the paste looks the same afterwards. What changes is behaviour: searches match, sorts settle down, and validators accept the field.
Does it affect normal hyphens in the same text?
No. This page is locked to U+2011 only, so “well-known” and “2018-2022” written with ordinary hyphens are left exactly as they are. That is the point of a single-character tool — the fix is surgical.
Should I remove them everywhere?
Only where the text has to be matched or parsed. In a printed document the non-breaking hyphen is doing useful work: it keeps a code or a compound name from breaking across lines. Clean the data copy for machines and keep the typographic version for print.
Ready to clean your text?
No sign-up, no upload, no word limit. Paste, pick, and copy the result.
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