Incorrect use of em dashes - replace with en dashes

[SophieAmnesty]

Describe the bug
Users have been using em dashes in their content incorrectly. They should be using en dashes instead. Hopefully there is a global fix we can do to fix this across the whole website.

Em dashes are sometimes incorrectly used as punctuation. Amnesty House Style states:

Use dashes (–), with a space on either side, NOT hyphens, as a form of punctuation, such as to indicate a break in the natural syntax of a sentence in speech. Use an en-dash (–), not the longer em-dash (—).

Examples: https://www.amnesty.org/en/careers/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/tech/surveillance-giants/ https://www.amnesty.org/en/petition/unite-for-afghanistan/

If we simply replaced all em dashes on the website with en dashes, this should work as a fix.

However, em dashes are also sometimes used with no spaces on either side. In this case we would want to replace the em dash with an en dash but also add a space on either side.

I'm trying to collect some more examples of this.

We may want to check whether a similar issue is happening with French/Spanish/Arabic text.

[SophieAmnesty]

SPANISH:

The rule does not apply to Spanish, so please skip the Spanish site when you launch the find-and-replace operation. In fact, in Spanish the correct dash is the longer one (—).

[SophieAmnesty]

ARABIC

It is a non-issue in Arabic. No need to address it. Thanks!

[SophieAmnesty]

FRENCH:

In French, the rule is (or was) to use the em-dash, but it's almost never followed, and today both the en-dash and em-dash can be considered as correct when used to introduce a parenthetical element, so no need to fix anything in French! 🙂

[SophieAmnesty]

It would be good if we could also somehow make it so that em dashes are blocked from future use on the English site too.