Encodings per buddy for IRC

[Martin Ott]

On Nov 22, 2007 2:52 AM, Mark Doliner <mark at kingant.net> wrote:
> So, uh, out of curiosity, is there any reason these channels aren't using
> UTF-8?  If everyone used UTF-8 for everything you wouldn't be having this
> problem, right?
Right indeed. Not to mention about the problem laying between keyboard
and monitor. Some people, especially when writing only in one language
on certain channels, prefer to "save electrons" for example by
agreeing to use only certain 8 bit characters. Just why should all of
them need to use more than one 8-bit character for any special one,
when  they have used to get along without all that so far.

The least thing to do according to the current state of IRC plugin
(which I am fond of already) could be specifying which encoding to use
for messages sent. Pidgin works very nicely when the encoding is
specified "UTF-8,ISO-8859-15" for example. Meaning that only in case
handling as UTF-8 fails, show as the latter one. The problem with such
case is that any message gets sent as UTF-8. But when specifying the
encoding value as "ISO-8859-15,UTF-8", then at least some characters
sent as UTF-8 still have quite a convertable (but invalid) ISO-8859-15
representation to display.

Have to mention that the need for one encoding or another is more
chatroom- (channel-) and buddy specific than server specific. The
sensible defaults (by me) for any IRC related messaging could be like
"UTF-8,ISO-8859-15" for messages received and specific encoding for
messages sent.

I would even agree to specify those by Pidgin IRC account with
something like "UTF-8,*ISO-8859-15". Please note that asterisk in
front of the second encoding value to override the encoding for
messages sent. I would love to be able to specify such thing only for
some channels and to have encoding settings per IRC account as default
for every channel (or buddy).


-- 
Martin