How to type – for Developers
Developers run into en dash (–) (–) constantly — in citations, foreign names, mathematical notes or social posts. The fastest path is to copy the character below; further down you'll find the system shortcut, HTML entity and Unicode codepoint, plus tips that fit how Developers actually work.
Copy – for Developers
Why Developers use this page
Seed test fixtures, write i18n strings and review pull requests with realistic foreign-language input — even on a stock US-layout laptop.
- Type into your IDE, GitHub PR description or terminal without changing the system input source.
- Test RTL, CJK, and combining-mark edge cases your unit tests must handle.
- Quote real-world strings in error messages, logs and changelog entries.
- Compose Stack Overflow questions in the asker's language to widen the search hit rate.
Tip for Developers
Pipe the text through our JSON Formatter or Find & Replace tools before pasting into source files.
HTML entity
–
–
Unicode codepoint
U+2013
Frequently asked questions
Why do Developers need a quick way to type –?
en dash (–) (–) shows up across the texts Developers produce daily, and rebuilding the keyboard layout for a single character isn't worth the friction.
Will – survive copy-paste into Word, Docs and email?
Yes. The character is stored as Unicode, so Developers can paste it into Word, Google Docs, Outlook, Gmail, Notion or any modern editor without corruption.
What if my font shows – as a box?
The font lacks the glyph. Developers can switch to a Unicode-complete font such as Noto Sans, Arial Unicode MS or Segoe UI and the symbol will render correctly.
Can I bookmark this page and reuse it?
Absolutely. Many Developers bookmark this page and copy – again whenever they need it — no install, no login, no tracking.