Re: tlug: Is IRC 8bit?

[Adrian Havill <havill@example.com>]

"Marc E. Christensen" wrote:

> I wm using x-chat and wondered if it supports Japanese input and char
> sets.  Anyone know if something like that is a restriction of the
> server, client or irc protocol?

older (and perhaps newer as well?) IRC servers internally consider "{" and
"[" to be the same character when doing case insensitive comparisons... so in
some situations a channel name in Japanese could be rejected as being the
same name. (due to the old pre-Latin-1 Slavic origins of IRC, the
braces/brackets are mapped to accented characters)

Thus, 7-bit ISO-2022-JP was a bad choice to standardize on IMHO-- EUC-JP
would've been a better choice. IRCX uses Unicode with language tagging.

Also, some Mac/Win Japanese IRC clients choose to use Shift-JIS instead of
ISO-2022-JP (Chocoa [Fujitsu freeware client] can do either ISO-2022-JP
(preferred default) or Shift-JIS based on a configuration setting)


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