Hyphen that prevents a line break.
dashestypography-The dashes that are not the ASCII hyphen-minus: the en dash of ranges, the em dash of interruptions, the true minus sign of mathematics, and the non-breaking hyphen.
From typography, from automatic conversion in word processors, and — increasingly noted — from text generated by language models, which use the em dash more freely than most people do.
As typography, yes. A range between two numbers takes an en dash, and a minus sign is not a hyphen; both are correct, and TraceFree keeps them by default.
A frequent em dash is sometimes read as a sign of machine-written text. That is a matter of style rather than correctness, and it is the author's call — which is why normalising them is a preset you choose rather than something that happens to you.
| Preset | Action |
|---|---|
conservative | kept |
default | kept |
report-only | asked about |
strict | replaced |
Context guards can only ever make a cleanup gentler, never sharper. A rule saying “always remove” does not override them.
In TraceFree, turn on the clipboard watcher and copy the text — the finding appears with a before-and-after comparison of the affected lines. For files, a watched folder does the same, keeping a backup copy alongside.
This page never prints the character itself, only ways of writing it. A page about invisible characters that contained invisible characters would be unreviewable — and that is the problem the program exists to solve.
| Notation | Value |
|---|---|
| Unicode | U+2011 |
| Rust | \u{2011} |
| JavaScript, Python | \u2011 |
| HTML | ‑ ‑ |
| Regex (PCRE, Rust) | \x{2011} |