UTF-8 in PuTTy February 26, 2012

At work we use Windows on the desktop and so often end up using PuTTy to administer UNIX servers.

Recently I’ve been migrating a large MySQL database containing both Latin-1 and UTF-8 encoded tables. Whilst verifying that the migrated tables were correctly encoded I discovered that by default PuTTy will display Latin-1 even if the remote server’s locale is UTF-8.

Fortunately if you need to work with UTF-8 in PuTTy then you can change the following option:

Configuration -> Window -> Translation -> Remote character set -> UTF-8