4.10.1 Controlling character set translation

During an interactive session, PuTTY receives a stream of 8-bit bytes from the server, and in order to display them on the screen it needs to know what character set to interpret them in. Similarly, PuTTY needs to know how to translate your keystrokes into the encoding the server expects. Unfortunately, there is no satisfactory mechanism for PuTTY and the server to communicate this information, so it must usually be manually configured.

There are a lot of character sets to choose from. The ‘Remote character set’ option lets you select one. By default PuTTY will attempt to choose a character set that is right for your locale as reported by Windows; if it gets it wrong, you can select a different one using this control.

A few notable character sets are:

• The ISO-8859 series are all standard character sets that include various accented characters appropriate for different sets of languages.
• The Win125x series are defined by Microsoft, for similar purposes. In particular Win1252 is almost equivalent to ISO-8859-1, but contains a few extra characters such as matched quotes and the Euro symbol.
• If you want the old IBM PC character set with block graphics and line-drawing characters, you can select ‘CP437’.
• PuTTY also supports Unicode mode, in which the data coming from the server is interpreted as being in the UTF-8 encoding of Unicode, and keystrokes are sent UTF-8 encoded. If you select ‘UTF-8’ as a character set you can use this mode. Not all server-side applications will support it.

If you need support for a numeric code page which is not listed in the drop-down list, such as code page 866, then you can try entering its name manually (CP866 for example) in the list box. If the underlying version of Windows has the appropriate translation table installed, PuTTY will use it.