Background:

I want to upload the file from windows to RHEL5 server, the file stores Spanish words with UTF-8 encoding. it's used as the data source for loading to database.

some special characters in files like following.
í
ó
Ñ
á

Linux setting:
$ echo $LANG
en_US.UTF-8

I use WinSCP with UTF-8 ON to upload the file to linux server.
I also tried use ssh client to upload.

when I use VI to browse the file, the special characters display unrecognized.

How I can resolve this problem?
Is it a transfer setting problem or system setting problem?

thanks !

Did you compare the binary representation of those spanish chars on both systems, and against the unambiguous UTF-8 definition? If they are the same - and, of course, correct - on both systems, change the transfer settings, if not, correct the result with e.g. iconv or recode .