Free AI Text Cleaner
Special Characters Remover
Normalise em dashes, en dashes, curly quotes, ellipses, and all non-standard punctuation from AI-generated text to safe ASCII equivalents — free, in your browser.
Paste Your Text
Supports text from ChatGPT, Claude, and other AI assistants
Your text is processed locally. We do not store your data.
Upload Files
Drag & drop files or
Supported: .txt, .docx, .pdf (max 10MB, up to 10 files)
Cleaning Settings
Original Text
0 charactersCleaned Text
Your text is processed locally. We do not store your data.
AI language models overwhelmingly prefer typographic punctuation over plain ASCII — em dashes instead of double-hyphens, curly quotes instead of straight quotes, ellipsis characters instead of three dots. While visually similar, these Unicode characters create encoding mismatches in databases, break API JSON payloads, and are a strong AI-writing signal for detection tools. The Special Characters Remover normalises them all to their ASCII equivalents.
Special characters AI writers inject
Every major AI writing tool uses typographic punctuation. Here are the most common offenders.
Em dash
U+2014 → --The most common AI punctuation marker. Replaced with a double-hyphen or single hyphen depending on context.
En dash
U+2013 → -Used by AI writers in number ranges and compound adjectives. Normalised to a standard hyphen.
Curly / smart quotes
U+2018, U+2019, U+201C, U+201D → ' "Typographic quote pairs replace straight ASCII quotes in all major AI outputs, breaking JSON, HTML attributes, and code snippets.
Ellipsis character
U+2026 → ...The single Unicode ellipsis replaces three separate ASCII dots, causing truncation in systems with fixed-width character handling.
How to remove special characters in 3 steps
- 1
Paste or upload
Paste AI-generated text with typographic punctuation, or upload a .txt or .docx file. Up to 10 files supported.
- 2
Normalisation scan
The remover maps every typographic character to its ASCII equivalent and applies the replacements in one pass.
- 3
Review & export
Diff view highlights every substitution. Copy or download the normalised text.
Before & after special character normalisation
Before — contains hidden markers
AI—powered content—is “transforming” every industry… Here’s why.
After — clean, standard Unicode
AI--powered content--is "transforming" every industry... Here's why.
Frequently asked questions about Special Characters watermarks
- Why do AI tools use em dashes and curly quotes instead of ASCII?
- Language models are trained on text from books, journalism, and web content where typographic punctuation is standard. The model learns to prefer these Unicode characters because they dominate the training data.
- Em dashes look the same — why does removing them matter?
- While visually similar in most fonts, em dashes are single Unicode code points (U+2014) rather than two hyphens (--). This causes failures in plain-text parsers, databases with ASCII-only columns, JSON serialisers, and AI-detection tools that flag them as writing-style signals.
- Will normalising punctuation change the meaning?
- No. The semantic meaning is preserved. Only the specific Unicode character is replaced with its closest ASCII equivalent.
- Does this also remove zero-width and invisible characters?
- This tool focuses on visible typographic punctuation. For invisible characters, use the Zero-Width Character Remover or the Universal AI Sanitizer which covers both.
- Is my content private?
- Yes. All normalisation is performed locally in your browser with no server communication.
Clean text from other AI tools
Zero-Width Remover
Remove invisible zero-width Unicode characters that AI tools embed between words.
Universal Sanitizer
Remove all AI watermark patterns — invisible characters and typographic punctuation — from any AI output.
ChatGPT Remover
Full ChatGPT cleaner covering zero-width characters, HTML attributes, and smart quotes.
Or return to the main watermark eraser to clean text from any AI tool.