I used the second one. It might be easier to use the names - in the following I input plain dash "-", en dash "–" and em dash "—" and the output is plain dash, plain dash, double plain dash: 
"text - – —" input
"text - - --" output

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In reply to Re^3: malformed UTF-8 character in JSON string in perl by tangent
in thread malformed UTF-8 character in JSON string in perl by Yllar

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