C-Cedilla (Ç), Putty and Linux

Having just transferred a project from Sun Solaris to Red Hat Linux 5.1 on an HP Blade, we have an issue seeing C-Cedilla (�) characters in Putty.

While a 'more' command shows the � correctly, cut and paste converts it to ^A and vi converts it to yet another ctrl A character.

The � character is a very commonly used separator in our project and it's going to be a major pain to change it everywhere, so is there a simple solution to this?

I'd first check to make sure you're LANG environment variable matches the character set you've configured in Putty.

When logged into RH, do this:

echo $LANG

It should be set to en_US.UTF-8. If it's not, then you need the following line in your .bash_profile:

export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

Start a new shell and echo the LANG variable to make sure the changes to your profile worked.

If they did, it's time to make sure Putty is using UTF-8. From the putty config, under Window > Translation make sure the character set translation is also set to UTF-8.

That's usually where I start if Putty isn't working properly with various characters.

Thanks Stanley,

$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

So that's OK.

The translation we currently use on Sun is

ISO-8859-1:1998 (Latin-1, West Europe)

changing that to UTF8 in putty changes the character but not to a �, it's more of a graphics block preceded by ^.

Any other ideas?

Sorted.

Changing the LANG to LANG=en_GB.iso885915 and exporting it in my .profile has done the trick.

Thanks for the reply Stanley, it gave us the lead we needed.

Just to clarify, you are experiencing this problem in Redhat when connecting via SSH through putty, correct?

Try using the ISO-8859-1 character set in Putty and set your LANG to en_US:

export LANG=en_US