title: How to support extended curses characters with PuTTY
body: <p>I am creating a curses program that needs to use special box characters (<code>│</code>, <code>─</code>, <code>┌</code>, etc...) that can be found <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character" rel="nofollow">here</a>.  I am connecting to the Linux server where I do my programming with PuTTY.  When I just set the curses border to default (<code>screen.border(0)</code>), the border is made up of characters in the alphabet (<code>q</code>, <code>l</code>, <code>m</code>, <code>x</code>).  Is that normal?  </p>
  
  <p>The <code>curses.ACS_*</code> characters are also just alphabet characters on my screen.  I do not know what is wrong, but I am guessing it may have something to do with PuTTY.  I have even tried directly pasting the characters into a string, but there are lots of unicode problems with that that I cannot fix.</p>
  
  <p>Any help is appreciated. -=m0dem=-</p>
  
  <p>EDIT: The sample script below is what I have tried and does not work.</p>
  
  <pre><code>#!/usr/bin/python
  import curses
  import os
  
  os.environ["NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS"] = "1"
  screen = curses.initscr()
  
  screen.clear()
  screen.refresh()
  screen.border(0)
  # catch
  screen.getch()
  curses.endwin()
  </code></pre>