Excuse the misleading title. I am trying to reap that sweet sweet SEO.
This actually applies to any UTF8 character entered into Putty, and it is a Putty setting, not a Linux setting. Pretty much everything that accepts input and built within the past several years will already use UTF8, so that isn’t the issue. The issue is Putty’s default language being set to Latin-1

Within Putty, you will need to click on the “Translation” option, then select UTF-8 from the dropdown. Much like menopause, your periods will disappear and no longer bother you. This also applies to tunnels from one server to another.