Em Dash Remover

Paste your text below to remove or replace em dashes and other AI text artifacts. Perfect for cleaning up text from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and other AI writing tools.

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Replace em dashes with:
Also replace en dashes
Replace smart quotes with straight quotes
Replace ellipsis character with three dots
Replace non-breaking spaces
Remove zero-width characters

Character Count: 0 | Word Count: 0 | Sentence Count: 0 | Line Count: 0

What is an em dash and why do I need to remove it?

An em dash is the long dash character (—) commonly used in formal writing to separate clauses or add emphasis. AI writing tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini tend to overuse em dashes in their output, making them one of the most recognisable signs of AI-generated text. Removing or replacing em dashes helps your text appear more natural and avoids the telltale AI writing style.

How do I remove em dashes from ChatGPT text?

Simply paste your ChatGPT output into the text box above. The tool automatically detects and replaces all em dashes with hyphens by default. You can also choose to replace them with commas, spaces, or remove them entirely using the dropdown menu. The cleaned text appears instantly in the output panel, ready to copy.

Why does ChatGPT use so many em dashes?

Large language models like ChatGPT are trained on professionally edited content such as books, articles, and publications where em dashes are standard punctuation. As a result, AI models reproduce this style far more frequently than most people write naturally. The overuse of em dashes has become one of the most discussed indicators of AI-generated content, prompting many users to clean their text before publishing.

What is the difference between an em dash, en dash, and hyphen?

These three dash characters look similar but serve different purposes:

Em dash (—) - The longest dash, used to separate clauses or add parenthetical statements. This is the character most overused by AI tools.
En dash (–) - A medium-length dash, typically used for ranges like "2020–2025" or "pages 10–20".
Hyphen (-) - The shortest dash, used in compound words like "well-known" or "up-to-date".

This tool replaces em dashes by default, and you can optionally enable en dash replacement in the settings.

Can I also remove smart quotes and other AI text artifacts?

Yes. In addition to em dashes, the tool offers several optional cleanup features:

Smart quotes - Replace curly quotes (“ ” ‘ ’) with straight quotes (" ')
En dashes - Replace en dashes (–) with hyphens
Ellipsis character - Replace the single ellipsis character (…) with three dots (...)
Non-breaking spaces - Replace non-breaking spaces with regular spaces
Zero-width characters - Remove invisible characters sometimes embedded in AI-generated or web-copied text

Enable these options using the checkboxes in the settings panel to clean up all common AI and word processor artifacts at once.

Does this tool work with text from Claude, Gemini, and other AI tools?

Absolutely. While ChatGPT is the most well-known for overusing em dashes, other AI writing tools including Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Perplexity also produce text with em dashes and similar typographic characters. This tool works with text from any source, whether it's AI-generated, copied from Microsoft Word, Google Docs, or any website.

What should I replace em dashes with?

The best replacement depends on context:

Hyphen (-) - The most common choice. Works in most situations and is the default option.
Comma (,) - Good when the em dash is used as a pause or to separate clauses in a sentence.
Space - Useful when you simply want to join the words on either side.
Nothing (remove) - Best when the em dash appears at the start of a line or between characters with no spacing.

How can I clean up text copied from Word or Google Docs?

Word processors like Microsoft Word and Google Docs automatically convert straight quotes to curly "smart" quotes and hyphens to em dashes as you type. When you paste this text into code editors, databases, email templates, or plain text fields, these special characters can cause display issues or encoding errors. Use this tool to convert everything back to plain ASCII characters by enabling the em dash replacement, smart quotes, and non-breaking space options.

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You might also find these tools helpful for cleaning and formatting your text:

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Remove Letters & Characters - Remove specific characters from your text
Plain Text Converter - Convert rich text to plain text
Find and Replace - Search and replace any text pattern
Text Case Converter - Change text between uppercase, lowercase, and other formats

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