# Citation key escaping with auto-linking

**URL:** <https://discourse.jabref.org/t/citation-key-escaping-with-auto-linking/3603>\
**Category:** Help\
**Created:** [October 18, 2022, 10:59am UTC](https://discourse.jabref.org/t/citation-key-escaping-with-auto-linking/3603 "2022-10-18T10:59:40Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![su8nonqf5287](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/258eb7/32.png) [@su8nonqf5287](https://discourse.jabref.org/u/su8nonqf5287)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2022, 10:59am UTC](https://discourse.jabref.org/t/citation-key-escaping-with-auto-linking/3603/1 "2022-10-18T10:59:40Z")

</div>

I typically use a citation key scheme that includes a colon “:” to separate between the author information and some shorthand key for the publication.  
However, this character caused problems in my file system, as this is a special character that is not allowed. This problem is respected by JabRef when automatically renaming a file and the colon is automatically replaced by an underscore.

However, it seems that the “other direction”, i.e. finding an auto-linked file that is saved on disk with the escaped character instead of the colon, does not work.  
Is there a way to generalize the auto-link feature to do a fuzzy search regarding certain characters?  
When changing the citation key manually to use the underscore, auto-linking works fine.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Siedlerchr](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/flex030/user_avatar/discourse.jabref.org/siedlerchr/32/216_2.png) [@Siedlerchr](https://discourse.jabref.org/u/Siedlerchr)\
**Post date:** [October 18, 2022, 3:50pm UTC](https://discourse.jabref.org/t/citation-key-escaping-with-auto-linking/3603/2 "2022-10-18T15:50:54Z")

</div>

Hi,

thanks for your reporting! I think this is simply a bug that the replaced keys are not considered for searching. Can you please open a bug report at our github repo?