Remove em dashes API

Swap every em dash and en dash for a plain hyphen, the fastest way to stop text reading as AI-written.

When to call it

House styles that ban the em dash, plain-text emails, CSV columns and terminal output all want a hyphen. Doing the swap in code means it happens to every string a service emits, including the ones pasted in by somebody who did not know the rule.

For a one-off, the browser version needs no token and never sends your data anywhere: it runs on your own machine.

Example

curl -X POST https://astraltext.com/api/v1/remove-em-dashes \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ast_YOUR_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"input": "Two rules — one style guide – zero exceptions."}'

{
  "tool": "remove-em-dashes",
  "result": "Two rules - one style guide - zero exceptions.",
  "chars": 46,
  "ms": 1
}

In your language

const res = await fetch("https://astraltext.com/api/v1/remove-em-dashes", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ASTRAL_TOKEN}`,
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({"input": "Two rules — one style guide – zero exceptions."}),
});
if (!res.ok) throw new Error((await res.json()).detail);
const { result } = await res.json();

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://astraltext.com/api/v1/remove-em-dashes",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['ASTRAL_TOKEN']}"},
    json={"input": "Two rules — one style guide – zero exceptions."},
    timeout=30,
)
res.raise_for_status()
result = res.json()["result"]

Parameters

Errors

Errors are RFC 7807 problem documents with a stable type you can branch on.

Questions

Does it touch the ordinary hyphen?

No. A hyphen-minus is already what this produces, so text that never had a dash comes back byte for byte identical.

What about spacing around the dash?

Spacing is preserved exactly as it was. The character is replaced and nothing else moves, so a spaced dash stays spaced.

Which characters count as a dash here?

The em dash and the en dash. Minus signs, figure dashes and horizontal bars are left alone because replacing those would change meaning in maths and in tables.

Other endpoints

• AI text cleaner API
• Remove invisible characters API
• Remove emoji API
• Remove line breaks API
• Strip Markdown API
• Remove citations API