Convert smart punctuation to plain ASCII

Replace curly quotes, fancy dashes, and ellipses with plain-text ASCII — the cleanup runs in your browser.

Three quick steps

  1. Paste your text into the editor below.
  2. Fix & Copy to normalize the odd characters.
  3. Done — the cleaned text stays on your device.
“Smart” quotes, en dashes – em dashes — and ellipses… become plain text.

Paste your text

We only run in your browser. No uploads, no logs.

Red (auto-fixable): 0 Yellow (review manually): 0 Total characters: 0

How it works

  • Highlights curly quotes, angled apostrophes, and other typographic punctuation.
  • Replaces them with ASCII quotes, apostrophes, periods, commas, and hyphens that copy cleanly into code or plain text systems.
  • Leaves intentional typography (e.g., true em dash) alone when no ASCII equivalent is desired.
  • Runs entirely client-side so manuscripts and confidential drafts never leave your machine.

Best for this cleaner

Use this page as a pre-flight check before you publish, submit, or automate text. It is strongest at character-level cleanup, not rewriting your message.

  • Copying writing into plain-text systems such as Markdown editors, CMS fields, and CLI tools.
  • Preparing prompts, changelogs, or support responses where ASCII consistency matters.
  • Avoiding encoding issues when sharing text across older systems.

Manual review checklist

After fixing characters, do one quick human pass. This catches tone or meaning issues that no character normalizer can decide for you.

  • Keep typographic punctuation only when it is a deliberate style choice.
  • Re-read quoted text to ensure meaning did not change after apostrophe or dash swaps.
  • If content is legal/contractual, compare final punctuation against the source document.

Mini FAQ

Which characters are replaced?

We normalise curly quotes, smart apostrophes, ellipses, thin spaces, and exotic dash variants. You can inspect the highlights before copying to confirm.

Will it touch non-Latin punctuation?

We only target characters with obvious ASCII equivalents. CJK punctuation, for example, is left alone unless it is a known AI tell.

Can I keep em dashes?

Yes. The tool highlights them so you can keep or replace them manually — it only auto-replaces characters with safe ASCII swaps.

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