Em-Dash & Smart Quote Remover
Strip em dashes, curly quotes, ellipses and other smart punctuation from AI or Word text and convert them to plain ASCII.
Your text
Cleaned text
How to use the em dash and smart quote remover
Paste text that contains curly quotes, em dashes, en dashes, ellipses or other typographic punctuation. Choose whether to convert each character to its closest plain ASCII equivalent (recommended) or delete it. The cleaned text and a count of every replacement appear instantly.
Why this tool matters
Microsoft Word, Google Docs, Notion and most AI writing tools turn straight quotes into curly ones and double hyphens into em dashes. These characters look polished, but they cause problems in code strings, JSON, CSV files, command-line input, database fields and some email subject lines. AI-generated content has become one of the most common sources of unwanted em dashes.
Common use cases
- Cleaning AI-generated drafts before pasting them into a CMS
- Preparing JSON or CSV strings where curly quotes break parsing
- Tidying code comments and string literals
- Email subject lines, where unusual characters can render badly
- Database imports where smart quotes cause encoding errors
- Cleaning copy before sending it to a translation service
The AI em dash problem
AI writing tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Copilot use long dashes heavily in long-form output. Many editors find this jarring, and readers increasingly see it as a sign of machine-written text. Running a draft through this tool is a quick first step before a human edit. Pair it with light rewriting so sentences still flow naturally.
Frequently asked questions
Will this hurt my writing style?
Swapping em dashes for hyphens makes copy look a little less typeset but more compatible. For code, CSV, JSON and email subjects, strip them. For finished prose, it is often better to rewrite the sentence with a comma, colon or full stop.
Why are non-breaking spaces included?
Non-breaking spaces (U+00A0) look exactly like regular spaces but can break some parsers and searches. Word processors often insert them automatically.
Will this help AI content pass detection tools?
It removes one signal, not the underlying pattern. Detectors look at sentence structure, word choice and style far beyond punctuation. Use this tool to clean text, not to disguise it.
Does it keep emoji and accented letters?
Yes. Only specific punctuation characters are changed. Emoji, accented letters, Cyrillic, Arabic and other text pass through untouched.