Getting strange character output in PuTTY on one Ubuntu machine

[Peter Flynn]

On 28/07/2021 12:11, Bo Berglund wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Jul 2021 09:11:41 +0100, Peter Flynn <peter at silmaril.ie> wrote:
> 
> (Note: This is a reconstruction on how Peter's response would have
> looked if he had sent it to the list rather than mail only to me.)

Oops :-0

[...]
> The two thousands separators show up as boxes in PuTTY and I copied 
> that out from PuTTY into Notepad++ and saved it to disk. Then opened
> in HxD where I could find the hex code as:
> 
> 3 663 = 33 E2 80 AF 36 36 33 20
> 2 835 = 32 E2 80 AF 38 33 35
> 
> So the thousands separator seems to have been set to Unicode(?) char E2 80 AF
> whatever that might be...

The Unicode charts say it's

U+202F	 	e2 80 af	NARROW NO-BREAK SPACE

So the update script (or is it apt itself) is using an unbreakable space
instead of a locale-dependent thousands separator.

> But as I said changing the PuTTY font to Hack fixed the display
> problem for me.

That's the key. Courier New doesn't have a narrow no-break space in it.
Hack does.

Peter