Dash Instead of Colon on keyboard

gi_gi_gi wrote the following question:

Why is my MacBook suddenly typing a hyphen when I am hitting the colon key (shift/semicolon)? It does not happen in email or text documents.

The question was too old to reply to so I'll reply here:

1) Is this only happening when you are trying to save and name a file? Like a download from your internet browser? Or is this happening all the time in all applications?

I have run into this but only when trying to save and name some sort of download from the internet. Windows machines cannot handle ":" in a file name so almost all internet browsers will automatically convert a colon to a dash or hash or something like that. EVEN if you are on a mac (because macs don't mind a colon in a file name, make your own judgements here about which is better, lol) your browser will override and not let you save a file with a colon in the title.

If it is happening all the time in all applications, then you have a whole different problem.

Hope this helps