U+2012
FIGURE DASH

Digit-width dash.

Codepoint: U+2012
Short: FIGD
Group: dashes
Class: typography
Default: kept
Replaced by: -

What it is

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.

Where it comes from

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.

When it belongs

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 PRO 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.

What TraceFree PRO does with it

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.

How to remove it

In TraceFree PRO, turn on the clipboard watcher and copy the text. On the command line:

tracefree clean --backup document.txt
pbpaste | tracefree clean | pbcopy

Report without changing anything — exit code 1 on findings, so it works in CI:

tracefree check -r ./docs

How to write it

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+2012
Rust	\u{2012}
JavaScript, Python	\u2012
HTML	‒ ‒
Regex (PCRE, Rust)	\x{2012}

Related characters

Try it on your own text

Paste anything into the browser demo and see what is in it. Same engine as the app, running entirely on your device — nothing is uploaded.

Try it

U+2012FIGURE DASH