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Remove All Dashes — em dashes, en dashes and hyphens, gone

One button for the whole dash family. Paste text that mixes —, – and -, press Remove all dashes, and copy the result.

Every other tool on this site is deliberately narrow: one dash type, one replacement, no decisions. This page is the opposite end of that scale — it is the cleanup you run when you do not know, or do not care, what kind of dashes are hiding in the text. It matches all three families at once: the em dash family (—, ―, and the two- and three-em dashes), the en dash family (–, ‒) and the hyphen family (the keyboard hyphen, the Unicode hyphen, the non-breaking hyphen and the invisible soft hyphen). A single click takes them all out.

It is the right first pass for text of unknown origin. A PDF export often carries a horizontal bar where an em dash belongs, a spreadsheet range arrives with an en dash, and a marketing line has been hyphenated by three different tools. Because the remover works by Unicode code point rather than by a character you have to type into a search box, none of those variants can hide: the counter above the tool reports how many of each family were found before anything changes.

Something to know before you run it: the replacement is empty, so dashes are deleted rather than swapped. Where a dash separated two words it leaves one space behind — “the plan — risky as it was — worked” becomes “the plan risky as it was worked”, never “the plan risky”. A dash glued inside a word disappears entirely, so “well-known” becomes “wellknown” and “2018–2022” becomes “20182022”. That is exactly what a system that forbids dashes and spaces needs; if you want the words kept apart, the hyphen remover opens them into “well known”, and the en dash remover turns “2018–2022” into “2018-2022”.

When you want every dash gone

The blunt cleanup shows up in four recurring jobs. Plain-ASCII pipelines: an import that rejects any non-ASCII byte and fails on the first em dash, where hyphen and space are the only legal separators. Slug and key generation: turning a headline into “wellknown”, “20182022” or “costeffective” for a URL, an identifier or a hashtag. Voice and caption workflows: text-to-speech engines read a dash as an unpredictable pause, so transcripts are cleaned before they are rendered. And keyword normalisation: two strings that look identical but carry different dash characters are different strings to a search index, which is why a site search misses a match that a human can see. In each case the goal is not a subtler punctuation mark — it is a byte-for-byte predictable string.

How a mixed document ends up with three kinds of dash

Dashes accumulate the way formatting always does: one document, several authors, several tools. Type “--” between two words in Word and AutoCorrect silently inserts an em dash; type “12-15” as a range and a style-guide-smart editor converts the hyphen to an en dash; export the finished file to PDF and the em dash can come back as a horizontal bar (U+2015) that looks identical on screen and is a different character to every parser. Then somebody copies the text into a CMS, where the smart quotes and non-breaking hyphens come along for the ride. A find-and-replace pass cannot clean that text, because three of the characters cannot be typed into the search field. This remover can, which is why it is worth running even when you are sure “there are only hyphens in here”.

Remove all dashes vs. remove one kind

Use this page when the text is going into a system rather than into a reader: imports, identifiers, indexes, databases and anything that has to survive an encoding round trip. Choose the focused tools when meaning matters more than machinery — the hyphen remover opens “state-of-the-art” into “state of the art”, the en dash remover keeps ranges readable as “2018-2022”, and the em dash remover quietly fixes a draft that reads as machine-written without touching anything else. The all-in-one dash remover sits in the middle: tick the families you want, choose a replacement for each, and keep the rest of the document intact.

Clean up one dash family at a time

When meaning matters more than machinery, each of these tools keeps the text readable.

Em Dash Remover

Delete every em dash from a draft without touching ranges or compound words.

En Dash Remover

Turn ranges such as 2018–2022 into 2018-2022 for spreadsheets and imports.

Hyphen Remover

Open compound words instead of fusing them: well-known becomes well known.

Replace Em Dash

Swap em dashes for punctuation that reads better: a comma, colon, semicolon or space.

AI Dash Remover

Clean ChatGPT and Claude drafts, including the typed -- dashes they emit.

Dash Remover (All Options)

Pick the dash types and the replacement for each one on the main tool.

Questions

What does this tool remove — just dashes, or hyphens too?

All of them. Em dashes (U+2014), horizontal bars (U+2015), two- and three-em dashes, en dashes (U+2013), figure dashes (U+2012), the keyboard hyphen plus the Unicode, non-breaking and soft hyphens. Nothing else in your text is altered: quotes, spaces between sentences, line breaks and paragraphs all stay exactly as they were.

Will removing dashes leave double spaces behind?

No. Where a dash separated two words the remover leaves a single space, so “word — word” becomes “word word” rather than “word word”. Where a dash sat inside a word or at the start of a line it is deleted outright, along with the spaces that touched it.

Why did “well-known” become “wellknown”?

Because the dash was inside the word, deleting it fuses the two halves. That is the behaviour you want for slugs, identifiers and hashtags. If you would rather keep the words readable, use the hyphen remover, which replaces each hyphen with a space and returns “well known”.

Can I remove dashes but keep a separator in their place?

Yes — use the all-in-one dash remover and choose Hyphen, Blank space, Comma, Semicolon or Colon as the replacement. This page is the no-options version: dashes out, one space left where the dash separated two words, nothing else.

Does it work on a whole spreadsheet or a long document?

Yes. Paste a single sentence or a hundred thousand rows — the cleanup runs in your browser with no word limit and no upload, so a customer list is as safe as one paragraph. Nothing is sent to a server and nothing is stored.

Which dashes does a find-and-replace in Word or Docs miss?

It only finds characters you can type or paste into the search box, so it misses the horizontal bar, the figure dash, the Unicode and non-breaking hyphens and the invisible soft hyphen — all of which look identical to a dash on screen. This tool matches them by code point, which is the whole reason it exists.

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