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ー is just a dash.

There are a few flavors of dashes in modern Japanese documents. Only one of the following three characters is a dash. ー―一 If you were aiming for a dash, you want the one in the middle, because the two to either side are very definitely not dashes.

Thanks for the detailed information! Actually it was referring to what you said earlier:

"The nobasu character (ー) ordinarily lengthens the vowel sound directly proceeding it"

But did not know that it "had" to be directly followed by katakana. :)

That is a very subtle emoticon. It evokes Totoro, for me.

Hah, excellent. Now it does that for me too.

Are there dashes in Japanese? I suppose the interpunct character (・) best represents the idea.

The ー character is typically used with hiragana and katakana to elongate the previous character's tailing sound: リー for the name Lee (rii), メートル for meter (meetoru), as examples.

The ー character is not used after kanji because their sound cannot be elongated.

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