Dash (punctuation)

A dash is a punctuation mark, and is different from a hyphen. Several forms exist: the figure dash (‒), the en dash (–), the em dash (—), and the quotation dash (―).

The em dash may be used (in pairs) to distinguish parenthetical text. It may be thought of as a "strong" separator, used where a comma would not do the job. For example, "As I ran, I saw—My God!—no one was following."

The quotation dash is used to introduce quoted text.

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In computer programming, the figure dash, en dash, em dash, and quotation dash correspond to Unicode characters 0x2012, 0x2013, 0x2014, and 0x2015, respectively.

The HTML entity names for the en dash and the em dash are &ndash and &mdash, respectively. The equivalent HTML numeric character entity references are &#8211 and &#8212, respectively.

See also: Wikipedia:Special characters.