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Friday, August 28, 2009

Configuring PuTTY to use UTF-8 character encoding

When it comes to Windows (and Windows programs...) it's never late to "learn" something. Or forget something?

Straight to the point: as I needed a terminal to connect to my Solaris box down there, I decided to go for PuTTY. In this laptop I'm running Windows Vista (I'm not joking...) and I didn't want to install Cygwin for such a basic task.

PuTTY doesn't even intall: you just download it and run it. Fine! As soon as I connect, the first surprise.
I'm not a masochist and I didn't chose that directory name! My Solaris user is running with an UTF-8 encoding:


$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

and PuTTY is simply misunderstanding it. Well, to say the truth it isn't even trying to understand it. When you launch PuTTY you're presented a dialogue. In that dialogue, if you choose the Window/Translation tab, you'll the able to choose the character encoding PuTTY will be using during the translation process of the received data. Just set it to match your other endpoint encoding like this:

Et voilà! PuTTY is printing characters correctly:
Just a remark for the PuTTY guys: Windows/Translation doesn't seem such a good option name, to me, for a character encoding.
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12 comments:

  1. JCJanuary 7, 2011 at 2:29 PM

    Thanks for that useful tip. I was getting used to guess what was behind the wrong characters :-P

    Cheers

    ReplyDelete
  2. Enrico M. CrisostomoJanuary 7, 2011 at 9:09 PM

    You're welcome, glad it helped!

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sam TrenholmeFebruary 23, 2013 at 10:45 PM

    Thank you, very useful tip.

    ReplyDelete
  4. xlfApril 15, 2013 at 12:46 PM

    Thank you! Really quick tip and very usefull =)

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousApril 22, 2013 at 9:27 PM

    Thank you!

    ReplyDelete
  6. luckfullyApril 24, 2013 at 7:13 PM

    Thank you. Easy and right!

    ReplyDelete
  7. wirtualne biuro wroclawMay 9, 2013 at 12:43 PM

    thank's but maybe somebody knows how to change encoding permanently? I use your method and any time I restart putty have to do it again....

    ReplyDelete
  8. OmarJune 3, 2013 at 4:09 PM

    @wirtualne,

    In order to make these changes permanent in Putty, you open up Putty, make the changes you want to save, then click back on the Session window, click on the "Default Settings" under Saved Sessions, and then click on Save. Next time you open Putty whatever you changed prior to clicking save will still be in effect.

    ReplyDelete
  9. ScalpSeptember 5, 2013 at 7:31 PM

    August 2009 tip still is relevant

    ReplyDelete
  10. AnonymousOctober 3, 2013 at 10:37 AM

    Thanks ! You've made my sad life a bit less sad ! Thank you my favorite solaris addict !

    ReplyDelete
  11. AnonymousOctober 26, 2013 at 2:36 PM

    Great tip!

    ReplyDelete
  12. gautelJuly 14, 2015 at 11:16 AM

    Note: you may still get blocks for certain characters because the default fonts like Courier and Lucida Console don't have all unicode chars. Download and install http://dejavu-fonts.org/wiki/Download

    ReplyDelete