Symptoms

Bullet Points or "middot" are being substituted with a dash ( - ) when inputted into a JIRA field

Cause

There is code on JIRA that replaces "·" with "-" in all incoming web requests. There is no way to turn this off.

Some time ago, JIRA had trouble with users pasting text from Microsoft Word and the text not being displayable on Linux. One of the culprits was the Word Bullet character: "·". To get around this JIRA now translates the character in all incoming requests. We continue to do this to support platform independence.

Resolution

Don't use the · character.