PuTTY incorrectly displays the special characters € and £

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL)

Issue

The special characters € and £ are displayed in PuTTY as ⬠and £.

Resolution

The PuTTY character set must be set to UTF-8 just like the RHEL character set, not to ISO8859-15.
Explanation: RHEL sends characters encoded in UTF-8, but PuTTY displays them as characters in ISO8859-15 as in the following examples:

  • The character € (displayed as â¬):

    $ echo -n '€' | hexdump -C
00000000  e2 82 ac                                          |...|
00000003

    from above, we can see that 0xe2 is â, 0x82 is not displayed, 0xac is ¬

  • The character £ (displayed as £):

    $ echo -n '£' | hexdump -C
00000000  c2 a3                                             |..|
00000002

    from above, we can see that 0xc2 is Â, 0xa3 is £

See ISO8859-15 character table.
Warning: The above link is to a source that is not authored by Red Hat directly. As such, Red Hat support cannot verify its accuracy and content.

Root Cause

Different character encoding settings on the server and the client, both must be set to UTF-8.

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