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Note regarding Special Characters in Attachment File Names
Grant applications submitted for the Office of Justice Programs' (OJP) solicitations will be rejected by Grants.gov due to the use of special characters in the file names of attachments applicants may be attempting to upload with the grant application(s). Grants.gov only permits the use of certain specific characters in names of attachment files. Valid file names may include only the characters shown in the table below.
| Characters | Special Characters | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Upper case (A - Z) | Parenthesis ( ) | Curly braces { } | Square brackets [ ] |
| Lower case (a - z) | Ampersand (&) | Tilde (~) | Exclamation point (!) |
| Number 0 - 9 | Comma ( , ) | Semicolon ( ; ) | Apostrophe ( ' ) |
| Underscore ( __ ) | At sign (@) | Number sign (#) | Dollar sign ($) |
| Hyphen ( - ) | Percent sign (%) | Plus sign (+) | Equal sign (=) |
| Space | When using the ampersand (&) in XML, applicants must use the "&" format. | ||
| Period (.) | |||
Grants.gov is designed to reject applications that include attachments with file names that contains any characters not shown in the table above. Grants.gov is designed to forward only properly submitted applications to DOJ's Justice Grants Management System (JustGrants).[i]
If you attempt to upload a file that has any other special characters in its file name, Grants.gov will reject the entire application.
- For example, a file with this name would be accepted: Police$FirePlan.doc
- A file with this name would be rejected: Police^FirePlan.doc
If you attempt to upload a file with an unallowable character in its file name, the entire application will be rejected by Grants.gov and WILL NOT be forwarded to JustGrants for funding consideration.
We acknowledge that you and your stakeholders work very diligently to put together the most competitive grant applications for your community. We would not want this technical requirement to prevent your application from being considered.
Be aware that Grants.gov sends out a rejection notification immediately when an application is rejected; however, depending on when the application was submitted, the deadline to apply may have already passed by the time the applicant receives the rejection notice. Take special care to name attachments in accordance with the above referenced instructions to prevent your application from being rejected and potentially missing the application deadline. If you receive a Grants.gov rejection notice for an unallowable character in a file name before the deadline has passed, we encourage you to edit the file name, reattach the file, and resubmit your application before the deadline so your application can be considered for funding.
For technical assistance with submitting files to Grants.gov, prior to the application deadline, call the Grants.gov Customer Support Hotline at 800-518-4726 or 606-545-5035, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, except for federal holidays.
If you have other questions, please do not hesitate to contact the solicitation contact listed in the Contact Information section of the solicitation. Finally, these technical issues can be resolved or avoided, so give yourself enough time to properly submit a valid application.
[i] (JustGrants) does not accept executable file types as application attachments. These disallowed file types include, but are not limited to, the following extensions: ".com," ".bat," ".exe," ".vbs," ".cfg," ".dat," ".db," ".dbf," ".dll," ".ini," ".log," ".ora," ".sys," and ".zip." JustGrants may reject applications with files that use these extensions. It is important to allow time to change the type of file(s) if the application is rejected.