TextWash

This page converts U+2014 EM DASH, U+2013 EN DASH and eight rarer dash lookalikes to plain hyphens. The sample shows the classic pasted-flag failure. Everything runs in your browser — nothing is uploaded.

Input

X-ray hover a highlight for details

Cleaned output copied ✓

Cleaning rules

What is U+2014 (em dash)?

The long typographic dash — this one — used for asides and breaks in prose. Its shorter sibling U+2013 (en dash) marks ranges like 10–25. Both are correct typography, and both are entirely different characters from the ASCII hyphen-minus - that code and command lines expect.

Where it comes from

Word, Google Docs, Outlook and macOS/iOS autocorrect turn -- into an em dash as you type. Publishing tools and many websites do the same, so command-line instructions in blog posts often ship with em dashes where double hyphens belong. LLM-generated text is famously em-dash-heavy too.

What it breaks

The classic: copy npm install —save-dev or curl —verbose from a formatted page and the tool reports an unknown argument, because —save-dev is not --save-dev. En dashes hiding in version ranges, config values and spreadsheet numbers cause quieter failures. ASCII-only pipelines (older terminals, some log processors, legacy databases) mangle them into mojibake like —.

Fix it

Paste the text above — every dash variant is highlighted in blue and converted to a plain hyphen in the cleaned output. One caveat: an em dash becomes one hyphen, and most long CLI flags want two (--save-dev), because autocorrect originally ate -- to make the em dash. The x-ray shows exactly what was there so you can tell. If you only want dashes fixed, untick the other rules.