• Tobias Schwarz
  • Fix Encoding Issues in Putty - Set Translation and Terminal-type

Fix Encoding Issues in Putty - Set Translation and Terminal-type

Wed, Jun 29, 2016

Encoding Problems

I had encoding problems with Putty on a single server for quite some time now. Here is a screenshot of Midnight Commander to show what I mean:

Midnight Commander with encoding problems

Find and set the correct encoding

Usually it is easy to find the correct encoding and set it in Putty:

Login and list the locales with:

locale

You will get a list like this:

LANG=de_DE.utf-8
LC_CTYPE="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_NUMERIC="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_TIME="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_COLLATE="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_MONETARY="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_MESSAGES="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_PAPER="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_NAME="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_ADDRESS="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="de_DE.utf-8"
LC_ALL=de_DE.utf-8

Set the translation in Putty to the corresponding setting:

Setting for the correct encoding in Putty

Sadly this did not work in this case.

Change the Terminal-type string as well

In my case I had to change the Terminal-type string as well to get the encoding fixed:

Setting for the Terminal-type string

I just set the string to putty and here is the result:

Midnight Commander with correct encoding

Lesson learned, problem solved! If you have anything to add feel free to contact me.