Smart Quotes Cleaner
Replace curly quotes, em and en dashes, the ellipsis glyph, prime marks, and other typographic characters with plain ASCII — and strip non-breaking and zero-width spaces. Runs entirely in your browser, no server, no sign-up.
What this tool does
Paste text that's full of smart (curly) quotes, em/en dashes, the ellipsis glyph, and other typographic characters, and get back clean plain ASCII. It's the fix for text copied out of Word, Google Docs, Notion, or a web page that won't paste cleanly into code, a CSV, a config file, a terminal, or a JSON string. Everything runs locally in your browser: nothing is sent to a server, it works offline, and there's no sign-up.
Type or paste your text and the cleaned version updates instantly.
What gets replaced
| Typographic character | Becomes |
|---|---|
“ ” curly double quotes, « » guillemets, ″ double prime | " |
‘ ’ curly single quotes / apostrophe, ‹ ›, ′ prime | ' |
– en dash, − minus sign, ‐ ‑ ‒ hyphens | - |
— em dash, ― horizontal bar | -- (or your choice) |
… horizontal ellipsis | ... |
| non-breaking, thin, and other Unicode spaces | a regular space |
| zero-width space / joiner, word joiner, the BOM | removed |
Ordinary Unicode — accented Latin like café, CJK like 北京, and emoji — is
left untouched. This tool only straightens punctuation and whitespace; it
does not transliterate or strip accents.
Options
| Option | What it does |
|---|---|
| Em dash becomes | How — and ― are rendered: -- (default, the Markdown convention), -, or - (a spaced hyphen). |
| Normalize spaces | On by default. Folds non-breaking, thin, and other exotic Unicode spaces to a regular space and removes zero-width characters and the byte-order mark. Turn it off to clean only quotes and dashes. |
Examples
| Input | Output |
|---|---|
“Hello,” she said. | "Hello," she said. |
It’s a ‘test’ | It's a 'test' |
2010–2020 | 2010-2020 |
wait—what | wait--what |
Loading… | Loading... |
5′6″ | 5'6" |
non‑breaking (with NBSP) | non-breaking (plain) |
FAQ
Is it free and private?
Yes — your text never leaves your device, and the tool keeps working offline once the page has loaded.
What are "smart quotes"?
They're the curly, directional quotation marks
(“ ” ‘ ’) that word processors substitute for the straight ASCII quotes
(" '). They look nice in print but break code, regexes, CSVs, and JSON.
Why does my pasted text have invisible characters?
Copying from the web or a PDF often brings along non-breaking spaces and zero-width characters that look like normal spaces but aren't — they cause mysterious "string doesn't match" bugs. Leaving Normalize spaces on replaces or removes them.
Does it change accented or non-Latin letters?
No. Unlike a slug or
transliteration tool, this cleaner only touches typographic punctuation and
whitespace — é, ñ, 北京, and emoji pass through unchanged.
Can I keep em dashes as a single hyphen?
Yes — set Em dash becomes to -
(or - for a spaced hyphen) instead of the default --.
Developer & Automation Access
Run it from the terminal
Same engine as this page, headless — via the gizza CLI:
gizza tool smart-quotes-clean "“Smart” quotes, em—dashes, and ellipses…"New to the CLI? Get gizza →
Open it by URL
Pre-fill and auto-run this tool with query parameters — the names match the API/CLI:
https://gizza.ai/tools/smart-quotes-clean/?text=%E2%80%9CSmart%E2%80%9D%20quotes%2C%20em%E2%80%94dashes%2C%20and%20ellipses%E2%80%A6&em_dash=--&normalize_spaces=trueMachine-readable descriptor: tool.json — title + parameters JSON Schema for agents.