textcleanups

Remove em dashes

Replace every em dash (—) in your text with a comma, period or hyphen, with spacing and punctuation tidied for you.

Options
Replace each em dash with

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AI-written text

ChatGPT text cleaner
Remove hidden characters, odd spaces and Markdown from AI answers.
Remove em dashes
Replace every — with a comma, period or hyphen.
Remove Markdown
Turn Markdown into plain text: no **, #, links or tables.

Lines

Remove line breaks
Turn text broken across many lines back into clean paragraphs.
Remove duplicate lines
Keep the first copy of every line and delete the repeats.
Remove empty lines
Delete blank lines, or cut long gaps down to one.
Sort lines
Sort a list A to Z, Z to A, by length, reversed or shuffled.

Spaces and characters

Remove extra spaces
Collapse double spaces, trim lines and replace tabs.
Remove special characters
Strip symbols and keep only letters, numbers and punctuation you choose.
Remove emojis
Delete every emoji, including skin tones, flags and combined emoji.
Remove accents
Turn é into e, ü into u and ß into ss.
Convert smart quotes
Turn curly quotes, long dashes and ellipses into plain text.

Formatting and counting

Case converter
Switch text to sentence case, Title Case, UPPERCASE, camelCase and more.
Find and replace
Replace words or patterns across your text, with regex support.
Strip HTML tags
Turn HTML into clean, readable plain text.
Word counter
Count words, characters, sentences and reading time as you type.

How to remove em dashes

  1. Paste your text into the first box.
  2. Choose what each em dash becomes: a comma, a period or a hyphen.
  3. Read through the result, then copy it.

Which replacement to choose

ChoiceBeforeAfter
CommaThe planner—built for teams—is free.The planner, built for teams, is free.
PeriodIt's simple—most teams start fast.It's simple. Most teams start fast.
HyphenIt's simple—most teams start fast.It's simple - most teams start fast.

Comma works for most sentences, especially when dashes come in pairs around an aside. Period suits a dash that joins two complete thoughts, and the next word is capitalized for you. Hyphen keeps the pause but uses a plain keyboard character, which is useful for systems that can't handle special characters.

A dash at the start or end of a line is removed rather than replaced, and the tool avoids leaving doubled punctuation like ,. behind. No automatic replacement is right every time, so give the result a quick read.

Why people remove em dashes

The em dash is a perfectly good punctuation mark, but AI chat tools use it so often that many readers now see it as a sign that text was written by AI. Writers editing AI-assisted drafts often swap them out to make the text read more like their own. Some style guides and platforms also prefer simpler punctuation.

Em dash, en dash and hyphen

  • Em dash (—): the longest. Sets off an aside or a sudden break.
  • En dash (–): shows ranges like 2024–2025. Some writers and AI tools also use a spaced en dash ( – ) in place of an em dash, which this tool can replace too.
  • Hyphen (-): joins words like well-known. Hyphens are never changed.

Questions

Will it change hyphens in words like well-known?

No. Only em dashes are replaced, plus en dashes if you turn those options on. Hyphens are left alone.

How do I stop ChatGPT using em dashes?

You can ask it to avoid em dashes in your prompt or custom instructions. It often slips back into using them in longer answers, which is why many people clean them up afterwards.

Does removing em dashes make text undetectable as AI?

No. AI detectors look at writing patterns across the whole text, not one punctuation mark. Removing em dashes is a style edit.

Why are my date ranges unchanged?

En dashes in ranges like 10–20 are correct and kept by default. Turn on the range option to convert them to plain hyphens.