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I'm connecting to an OpenVMS system, using Putty, through a SSH connection.

I can successfully interact with the host system (supposed to be in DEC-MCS encoding), but when I send special characters (any character code in the 128-255 range, really), I get a different character on the host machine.

For instance, if I type "é", which has a codepoint of 0xE9, I get a "i" instead (codepoint 0x69). For a "è" (0xE8), I get a "h" (0x68), for a "à" (0xE0), I get a "`" (0x60), a "ù" (0xF9) becomes a "y" (0x79), etc.

It's probably not an encoding problem, because when putting a file containing accentuated characters on that server (by FTP), and displaying it using "TYPE NameOfThatFile" on putty, I get the expected characters.

So, it seems that the high-value bit is lost when sending the characters from my Putty to the OpenVMS server, as if the system thought I was only sending ANSI characters (in the range 0-127), and ignoring the value of the high bit. In the other direction (OpenVMS -> Putty), it works fine. I haven't seen any option in Putty to control this, so I guess it might be a problem on the OpenVMS side.

Any leads to correct this ? Thanks in anticipation.

Kzwix
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  • Is the PuTTY Configuration Connection → Serial → Data bits parameter set to `8`? – HABO Aug 30 '23 at 13:23
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    Yep. I'm honestly not even sure my putty has that parameter. The problem was on the server side, on the OpenVMS server. As StackOverflow closed the question as "out of topic", I hadn't bothered putting the reply here, but typing the command "SET TERM /EIGHTBIT" did the trick. And putting it in the LOGIN.COM file made it so that it would be executed at every login, thus correcting the problem. – Kzwix Aug 31 '23 at 16:49

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