Here is an interesting issue and I was wondering if anyone knows about this. I
have a list with a choice field (Location) and I am trying to create a view with
a filter on this field. Some of the values in the field have a - (dash). For
eg., "US - TX" or "US - CA"

The filter field just does not picks up the dash. It does pick up the spaces
though. I know that I can probably use the contains option to compare to states,
but I do not want to do that. Is there some other way that dash is represented
internally in sharepoint which I have to mention in my filter field?