VLookup error

I have a spreadsheet compiling data sent to us by a client. It involves Vlookups of names.

so I have vlookup set up and it all is working nicely, except when the name involved in the lookup has the ~ symbol in it.

So they send us the sheet, and for example, one of the names is Company ~A. I don't know why they put these tilda symbols in it, but they do. This causes a #NA error when i do the vlookup. If i modify it and remove the tilda symbol, it works. I do not want to modify every name with a ~ in it every time.

Is there anyway to work around this?