Clean Em Dashes Action for Mac

Overview

What Clean Em Dashes does

Converts paired and standalone em dashes to commas, changes dash-led lines to Markdown bullets, and cleans spaced en dashes and double hyphens. Numeric en-dash ranges stay unchanged.

Category	Text Editing & Formatting
Action type	JavaScript
Default result	Replace selected text by default
Internet	Not required

Example

Action and outcome

Clean Em Dashes example
Action	Outcome
Clean Em DashesSelected text: The new release — announced yesterday — delivers faster speeds.	The new release, announced yesterday, delivers faster speeds.

Workflow

Use Clean Em Dashes

Follow these steps to replace excessive em dashes with natural punctuation with ActionClip.

Select the text you want to use.
Choose Clean Em Dashes from ActionClip.
In editable text, ActionClip replaces the selection immediately. In read-only text, it opens the result for review and copying.

Before you add it

Requirements and privacy

Before you start: No setup required.
Your selected text: Runs locally in ActionClip’s JavaScript sandbox. Selected text does not leave your Mac.

Inspect before installing

Action script

The script below is included so you can inspect how the action works before downloading it.

JavaScript definition

function isHorizontalSpace(character) {
  return character === " " || character === "\t";
}

function dashLengthAt(text, index) {
  var character = text.charAt(index);
  if (character === "—") return 1;

  if (character === "-" && text.charAt(index + 1) === "-") {
    var end = index + 2;
    while (text.charAt(end) === "-") end += 1;
    return end - index;
  }

  if (
    character === "–" &&
    isHorizontalSpace(text.charAt(index - 1)) &&
    isHorizontalSpace(text.charAt(index + 1))
  ) {
    return 1;
  }

  return 0;
}

function removeTrailingSpace(text) {
  var end = text.length;
  while (end > 0 && isHorizontalSpace(text.charAt(end - 1))) end -= 1;
  return text.slice(0, end);
}

function cleanProseLine(line) {
  var output = "";
  var index = 0;

  while (index < line.length) {
    var dashLength = dashLengthAt(line, index);
    if (dashLength === 0) {
      output += line.charAt(index);
      index += 1;
      continue;
    }

    output = removeTrailingSpace(output);
    var nextIndex = index + dashLength;
    while (nextIndex < line.length && isHorizontalSpace(line.charAt(nextIndex))) {
      nextIndex += 1;
    }

    var left = output.charAt(output.length - 1);
    var right = line.charAt(nextIndex);
    var rightHasPunctuation = /[.,;:!?)\]}]/.test(right);
    var leftHasPunctuation = /[.,;:!?(\[{]/.test(left);

    if (left && right && !rightHasPunctuation) {
      if (!leftHasPunctuation) output += ",";
      if (left !== "(" && left !== "[" && left !== "{") output += " ";
    }

    index = nextIndex;
  }

  return output;
}

function cleanLine(line) {
  var bullet = line.match(/^([ \t]*)(?:—|-{2,})[ \t]+/);
  if (bullet) {
    return bullet[1] + "- " + cleanProseLine(line.slice(bullet[0].length));
  }
  return cleanProseLine(line);
}

function run(selected_text) {
  if (!selected_text) return "";

  var pieces = selected_text.split(/(\r\n|[\n\r\u000B\u000C\u0085\u2028\u2029])/);
  for (var index = 0; index < pieces.length; index += 2) {
    pieces[index] = cleanLine(pieces[index]);
  }
  return pieces.join("");
}