Use U+002D when a machine reads it
Form fields, usernames, slugs, identifiers, CSV and SQL imports, API payloads, code and configuration files. The ASCII hyphen is one byte and accepted everywhere.
SKU-4471 · jean-pierre · well-known
Copy & paste · Character reference
The Unicode hyphen (‐): the hyphen that is not on your keyboard
Copy the typographic hyphen (U+2010) in one click — identical on screen to the keyboard hyphen, a different character to every validator and database.
Or select it by hand
Click the box to select the character, then press Ctrl + C (⌘ + C on Mac).
- Character
- Unicode Hyphen
- Unicode
- U+2010
- HTML entity
- —
- Plain-text fallback
- -
Hyphen family
The short joiners - for compound words, names and codes.
The Unicode hyphen (‐, U+2010) is what typographers mean when they say “hyphen”. Your keyboard does not have it. The key above the zero produces the hyphen-minus, U+002D — a compromise character inherited from ASCII, which needed one glyph that could serve both as a hyphen and as a minus in early computing. U+2010 was added much later, when Unicode gave the hyphen a code point of its own, and desktop publishing software, PDF generators and professional typesetting systems use it whenever they are being precise. To a reader the two are indistinguishable. To a parser they are entirely different characters.
That gap is where the trouble lives. A hyphen copied out of a PDF, an InDesign export or a PDF-derived web page is frequently U+2010, and it then travels into places that expect ASCII: a username field that allows only letters, digits and the plain hyphen; a CSV import that rejects non-ASCII bytes; a search index where “well‐known” and “well-known” are different strings; a duplicate check that reports two identical-looking product codes as unique. The character is invisible to a find-and-replace that searches for the hyphen on your keyboard, because you cannot type the character you are looking for.
The fix is to normalise. Either replace each U+2010 with a plain hyphen, which preserves the look of the text and makes it ASCII-safe, or delete the hyphens entirely when the text is going somewhere that treats them as noise. This site’s hyphen remover matches every member of the hyphen family by code point — U+002D, U+2010, U+2011 and the invisible soft hyphen — and opens each one into a space, while the remove-all-dashes tool deletes them and the dash symbols reference will tell you which variant you were actually holding.
How to type an unicode hyphen
Keyboard shortcuts for every platform — or skip the typing and copy the character above.
| Platform | Shortcut |
|---|---|
| Windows (any app) | Alt + 8208 on the numeric keypad |
| Windows (reliable route) | charmap.exe → search U+2010 or “hyphen” |
| Mac | No shortcut — copy it above, or Emoji & Symbols (⌃⌘Space) |
| Google Docs | Insert → Special characters → search “hyphen” |
| HTML / CSS | ‐ (no named entity) · content: "\2010" |
| LaTeX | Use a font with the glyph; the keyboard - gives U+002D |
Unicode Hyphen examples
What the character looks like doing its job — and what changes if you swap in a different dash.
A hyphen that came out of a PDF
well‐known · cost‐effective
A hyphen in typeset copy
a six‐person team
A name pasted from a design file
Jean‐Pierre Dubois
A product code that failed validation
SKU‐4471
ASCII-safe or typographically correct?
The two hyphens exist for two audiences. Pick by destination, not by preference.
Use U+2010 when a page is being typeset
Print, PDF and font-controlled layouts, where the hyphen should sit at the correct height and width against the surrounding type. Never in a field that validates input.
a six‐person team
The rule that resolves almost every case: put the ASCII hyphen in anything that will be parsed, searched, sorted or stored, and keep the typographic hyphen for surfaces you control end to end. When in doubt, thehyphen removerandremove all dashespages exist to normalise text that has already travelled between the two worlds.
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
What is the Unicode hyphen?
The character U+2010, which is the hyphen as typography defines it: a short joining mark used inside compound words. It looks the same as the keyboard hyphen (U+002D, the hyphen-minus) but is a separate code point, and software that compares strings sees them as different characters.
Why does my text fail a validation check for a hyphen?
Because the character in the text is probably U+2010 rather than U+002D. Validators, usernames, slugs and older databases often accept only the ASCII hyphen-minus. Replacing the Unicode hyphen with a plain hyphen fixes it, and the change is invisible to a reader.
How do I tell the two hyphens apart?
You cannot by eye — they are the same width and shape in almost every font. Paste the text into the dash identifier on the dash symbols page and it reports which code point you have. In a word processor, switching on “show formatting marks” may also hint at substituted characters.
How do I type a Unicode hyphen?
On Windows, Alt + 8208 on the numeric keypad, or the Character Map searching U+2010. On macOS there is no default shortcut, so copy it from the button above or add it to a text replacement. In practice you rarely need to: the point of this page is usually to get rid of them.
Where do Unicode hyphens come from?
Almost always from a word processor, a design file or a PDF. Desktop publishing applications substitute the typographic hyphen as you type, PDF generation preserves it, and copying text out of the PDF brings it along — even though every field it is pasted into may prefer the ASCII hyphen.
Should I replace Unicode hyphens with plain hyphens or spaces?
Plain hyphens when the hyphen is part of a word or a code and the text only needs to be ASCII-safe. Spaces when you want the words separated, as in a title, a search phrase or a readable product name. The hyphen remover does the second in one click; the all-in-one tool can write a hyphen instead.
Unicode hyphens breaking a form?
The hyphen remover matches all four hyphen characters by code point — including the ones you cannot type into a find-and-replace box.
Clean every hyphen variant