Vim show strange  characters over putty

Question

When I am editing a file in Vim I have some lines with a bunch of  displayed.

I have already checked the encoding with

:set encoding

Answer 1

Does it appear when you type the British Pound symbol? Try changing your encoding:

:set encoding=latin1

Answer 2

Make sure that PuTTY is set for UTF-8 as well. You can do this under Window -> Translation -> Remote Character Set. You may need to choose a font that supports a reasonable portion of the Unicode range as well -- Terminal isn't necessarily going to cut it.