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Remove en dash & dashes: fix, swap or count every –

An en dash means “to”, “through” or “between”. Remove the dashes, replace them with a hyphen or the word “to”, or count the family — one paste, one page.

Dash remover tool

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Replace each dash with

Each dash becomes a plain hyphen — safe for every database and spreadsheet.

Press Ctrl (or ⌘) + Enter to run it again.

Text with hyphens instead

0dashes removed

En dashes (–) hide in the most machine-sensitive places in a document: date ranges such as 2018–2022, page spans such as pages 44–48, sports scores such as 3–0. Typographically correct and visually tiny, they still break CSV imports, older databases, search indexes and ASCII-only systems that expect a plain hyphen. The Remove tab finds every one of them — including the figure dash (‒, U+2012), the en dash’s rarer cousin — and turns each into a plain ASCII hyphen, which spreadsheets, SQL loaders and legacy CMS platforms parse without complaint.

The Replace tab is for prose. A hyphen is fine for data but cramped for running text, and deleting the dash outright fuses the numbers (“20182022”). Where the dash stands for a preposition, write the preposition: choose Custom, type “to”, and every range becomes “2018 to 2022” in one pass. The word replacement takes a space of its own, and a dash that joined two words keeps a single space so nothing fuses.

Not sure which job you need? Read the range aloud: if the dash means “to”, Replace is the honest edit; if the text is headed into a spreadsheet, Remove is the safe one; and Count tells you how many en dashes are even there — useful because the figure dash and the en dash render identically, and only the count distinguishes them. Everything runs client-side, so a customer list with ten thousand rows is as safe as a single sentence.

Remove en dashes

Deletion walkthroughs for data and documents. For prose, the Replace tab writes “to” in the dash's place instead.

Where en dashes come from

Style guides assign the en dash (–, U+2013) to ranges and connections: 2018–2022, pages 44–48, the London–Paris train, a 3–0 win. Word processors insert it automatically when you type a range with a hyphen and autocorrect kicks in, and professional manuscripts use it wherever “to” or “through” would otherwise appear. That correctness is exactly why the character travels so widely — and why it keeps turning up in text that is about to be pasted into a system that only understands the ASCII hyphen. Removing en dashes before an import avoids the entire class of “why does this column sort wrong” bugs.

En dashes in data — the safe default

For data, always turn an en dash into a plain hyphen (-). The hyphen is ASCII character U+002D: every database, spreadsheet, programming language and API since the 1960s handles it. Press the Remove tab and 2018–2022 becomes 2018-2022 — same meaning, universally accepted, with no leftover double spaces where the dash used to sit. If your source text also contains em dashes (a report that mixes prose and tables), the Remove all dashes tool clears both families in one pass.

En dashes in Excel or Google Sheets

Sheets: Edit → Find and replace, search for – and replace with -. Excel: Ctrl+H works the same way, and SUBSTITUTE(A1,"–","-") does it by formula. Neither dialog can see the figure dash (‒, U+2012), which renders like an en dash and fails imports just as hard. For a block of cells copied from a PDF or a report, the Remove tab above is faster — paste the block, copy the result back.

Replace en dashes: the three sane answers

What to put in the dash's place, with before-and-after examples. The right one depends on who — or what — reads the text next.

Hyphen

Data, spreadsheets, code

The universal answer for anything a machine has to parse. ASCII, one byte, understood by every database and language in use.

The survey ran 2018–2022.

The survey ran 2018-2022.

In prose a hyphen between two numbers can look cramped, but it is never wrong in data.

The word “to”

Prose and titles

An en dash in running text usually stands where a preposition went, so write the preposition: “to”, “through” or “between”.

Over the 2018–2022 period…

Over the 2018 to 2022 period…

Only works for ranges. A connecting en dash (“the London–Paris route”) needs a dash or the word “and”.

Blank space

Word pairs and prefixed names

When the dash joined two words rather than two numbers, a space separates them cleanly: pre–World War II, post–Cold War.

the pre–World War II era

the pre World War II era

Never use it inside a number range — “2018 2022” reads as two separate years.

Minus Sign

Negative numbers and maths

If the character is arithmetic rather than typographic — a temperature, a balance, a loss — the true minus (U+2212) is the correct glyph.

a –5 °C reading

a −5 °C reading

Still non-ASCII. Use the hyphen if the destination is a plain-text field.

Em Dash

Almost never

The one swap to avoid: the em dash marks an aside, not a range, so “2018—2022” is a common typo that changes what the sentence says.

pages 44—48

pages 44–48 or 44-48

If you are cleaning up that mistake, the Remove tab fixes it and the em dash page handles the longer character.

From the blog

Ranges, scores and the punctuation marks models reach for instead.

Do Em Dashes Mean AI?

Density measured on real text — including en dashes — and what it can prove.

Does ChatGPT Use Too Many Hyphens?

The hyphen-and-range habits, and when the hyphen is genuinely wrong.

ChatGPT Punctuation

Every giveaway character ranked by how much weight it deserves.

Other dash cleanups

Em Dash Tool

The longer dash needs different spacing rules — remove, replace or count it there.

Hyphen Tool

Compound words like well-known: remove the join, or swap it for a space or underscore.

Remove All Dashes

Strip em dashes, en dashes and hyphens together for a fully ASCII result.

Convert Dashes

Em dash ⇄ en dash ⇄ hyphen, swapped in place when the family itself is wrong.

Copy the En Dash

Need the character itself for a heading or a data label? Copy it in one click.

All Dash Symbols

Every dash character, code point and HTML entity on a single reference page.

Questions

What does the Remove tab do to an en dash?
It turns every en dash into a plain ASCII hyphen — the character every spreadsheet, database and API accepts. The figure dash (U+2012), which looks identical, is caught too. The counter shows how many were found, and no double spaces are left behind.
How do I replace an en dash with the word “to”?
Open the Replace tab, choose Custom, and type “to”. Every range becomes “2018 to 2022” in one pass, which is what most style guides recommend for running text. Use “through” for inclusive dates and “between … and” when the range is spelled out in full.
What is the difference between an en dash and a hyphen?
The hyphen (-, U+002D) joins compound words such as well-known. The en dash (–, U+2013) is slightly longer and marks ranges and connections: 2018–2022, pages 44–48, the London–Paris train. They are different characters, which is why swapping one for the other is a real edit rather than a cosmetic one.
What does the Count tab report?
The total number of en dashes and figure dashes in the paste, per character and per 1,000 words. En dashes at any density are fine in prose; the count matters when you are checking whether a document is safe for an ASCII-only import, or checking that a cleanup actually caught everything.
Why does a hyphen sometimes look wrong where an en dash was?
Because a typed hyphen is narrow and sits low, so “2018-2022” in a printed page looks tighter than the en dash version. In data that is irrelevant; in typeset prose, keep the en dash and fix it at the source instead. The rule most guides settle on: en dash for ranges in print, hyphen wherever the text has to survive a machine.
Can I remove en dashes and em dashes together?
Yes — the Remove all dashes tool clears em dashes, en dashes and hyphens in a single pass, and the all-in-one dash remover lets you give each family its own replacement. This page is deliberately narrow: the en dash family only, so a wrong guess cannot touch your em dashes or hyphens.

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