Text cleaner

Paste text and choose what each em dash should become: a semicolon, a comma, a colon, a full stop or a spaced hyphen. A full stop capitalises the word after it. Spacing is tidied either way, so "works—mostly" and "works — mostly" both come out as "works; mostly".

Curly quotes and apostrophes are turned straight, and the single … character becomes three full stops. Invisible characters that have no business in plain text, such as zero-width spaces and soft hyphens, are removed.

The replacement is mechanical. It can't tell whether a comma or a semicolon suits a particular sentence, so read the result and adjust the few that need it.

The hyphen, U+002D, joins words. The en dash, U+2013, is the width of an n and marks a range, as in 2020–2024. The em dash at U+2014 is wider again, the width of an m, and breaks a sentence.

Typewriters had none of the dashes, so typists made an em dash from two hyphens, --, and a spaced single hyphen stood in for the en dash. Word processors now turn -- into a real dash as you type, which is why so much pasted text has them.

This tool treats an em dash, a double hyphen and an en dash with a space on each side as a sentence dash, and replaces all three. An en dash with no spaces, between two numbers, is a range. It's left alone, so 2020–2024 doesn't turn into 2020, 2024.

For spacing problems, remove whitespace handles extra spaces, tabs and blank lines, including the no-break spaces this page also clears. To see exactly which invisible characters a string contains, paste it into the Unicode converter.