Why do some characters change or disappear when I type a document name?

When you’re naming a scan or a photo upload in Enoch File: Scan & Save and you type a slash, colon, or a few other special characters, you might notice the character quietly change into a hyphen — or not appear at all. That’s intentional, and it’s protecting your file.

A small set of characters have special meanings in the systems your document passes through on its way to your Google Drive. A slash, for example, is how iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Google Drive itself separate folder names in a path. Rather than let that break your upload, the app converts these characters as you type them so your file arrives cleanly.

Characters that get replaced with a hyphen

Three characters are converted to a hyphen (-) the moment you type them. These are ones you might reasonably type on purpose — in dates, labels, or file paths — and a hyphen keeps the meaning of what you were writing.

• Slash (/) — the path separator on iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Google Drive
• Backslash (\) — the path separator on Windows
• Colon (:) — illegal in Windows filenames

So a name like Wells Fargo 8/21/26 becomes Wells Fargo 8-21-26, and Meeting: Q4 Review becomes Meeting- Q4 Review. Your intent is preserved and the file uploads cleanly.

Characters that disappear entirely

Six characters are removed silently as you type them, because they’re almost never intentional in a document name and inserting a hyphen would just add noise:

• Asterisk (*)
• Question mark (?)
• Straight double-quote (")
• Less-than (<)
• Greater-than (>)
• Pipe (|)

These are all reserved characters on Windows, and some of them (*, ?) are wildcards in search and file-management tools. A filename containing them would be rejected or misinterpreted somewhere along the way.

Quick reference

You type	Result	Why
/ (slash)	-	Path separator on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Google Drive
\ (backslash)	-	Path separator on Windows
: (colon)	-	Illegal in Windows filenames
* (asterisk)	(dropped)	Wildcard on Windows and search tools
? (question mark)	(dropped)	Wildcard on Windows and search tools
" (straight double-quote)	(dropped)	Illegal in Windows filenames
< (less-than)	(dropped)	Illegal in Windows filenames
> (greater-than)	(dropped)	Illegal in Windows filenames
| (pipe)	(dropped)	Illegal in Windows filenames;

Examples

You type	The file saves as
Wells Fargo 8/21/26	Wells Fargo 8-21-26
Meeting: Q4 Review	Meeting- Q4 Review
path\to\file	path-to-file
Is this right?	Is this right
5-star *review*	5-star review
"quoted text"	quoted text
<draft>	draft
a|b|c	abc
8/21/26 Meeting: notes*	8-21-26 Meeting- notes

The last row shows what happens with a mix — the slashes and colon become hyphens, and the asterisk drops out entirely.

What passes through unchanged

Nearly everything else is fine. Spaces, periods, hyphens, underscores, parentheses, brackets, commas, semicolons, apostrophes, ampersands, hash marks, at signs, exclamation points, tildes, plus and equals signs, emoji, accented letters like é or ñ, and non-Latin scripts like Chinese or Arabic all work normally. Enoch File: Scan & Save isn’t restrictive about filenames — it only intervenes on the specific characters that would break something downstream.

A note about smart quotes

Your iPhone’s keyboard by default converts a straight double-quote (") into curly opening and closing quotes (" and ") as you type. Curly quotes are perfectly legal in filenames and pass through untouched, so with smart quotes on, a name like "quoted" keeps its quote marks. If you’ve turned smart quotes off in your iPhone’s Settings — or if you paste text from somewhere that uses straight quotes — those straight quotes will drop out.

Both are working as intended. It’s worth mentioning only because two people typing the same characters could see slightly different results depending on their keyboard settings.