Turn smart quotes and dashes into plain text
Word processors and phone keyboards swap straight quotes for curly ones as you type. Paste the text here and every curly quote, long dash, odd space and invisible character comes back as the plain version, with each change marked.
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Where plain punctuation matters
Code and JSON only accept straight quotes: in our tests Python and Node refused a string wrapped in curly quotes outright. A spreadsheet reads "Lead, Design" as one field and “Lead, Design” as two. Some older forms and databases only take plain ASCII and show a curly apostrophe as ’. And a single curly quote in a text message makes the phone use a different encoding, which cuts one message from 160 characters to 70.
What it leaves alone
Accented letters, currency signs and other symbols stay as they are; the line under the result lists anything outside plain ASCII that is left. Joiners inside emoji and inside words in Persian, Hindi and similar scripts are kept, because removing them breaks the emoji or the word. Direction marks in Hebrew or Arabic text are kept too.
Em dashes, three ways
Pick a spaced hyphen, a comma or two hyphens. A dash between two numbers, at the start of a line or before closing punctuation always becomes a single hyphen, so a comma never lands somewhere odd. Read the result once if you choose the comma: a dash that opens an aside and one that ends it both become commas, which is usually right and occasionally isn’t.
Garbled ’ characters
Text saved as UTF-8 and opened as Windows-1252 turns every curly apostrophe into ’ and every em dash into —. The repair option turns those back before cleaning. It only acts where the letters form a valid UTF-8 sequence, so real words like façade and naïve are never changed.
Your text stays with you
The text is cleaned on your own device as you type. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and you don’t need an account. Close the tab and it’s gone.
From our tests
- Curly quotes, em dashes and ellipses: when plain text needs them gone
Garbled ’ characters, broken JSON and CSV, SMS limits, and counts from six books.