/itunes uses utf-8 characters

[stephen@…]

/itunes uses utf-8 characters when printing the *** stars.

This causes irc clients that are not utf-8 aware, and terminals that are not utf-8 aware to either display erroneous characters, or mess up the display, including causing people that use irssi in a screen session that isn't set up correctly for utf-8 to have problems.

When writing network applications, one must be overly accepting in what one recieves, and overly strict about what one sends. Sending utf-8 characters over irc, which has no encoding standard, and where sending differently coded character may cause a problem, is not a good idea.

Perhaps it would be better if simple asterisks, which are ascii characters, would be a better idea.

[thomas@…]

worksforme.

On my Latin 9 channels, Colloquy correctly uses a lossy representation of the stars (i.e. "3 stars" instead of the utf-8 stars), and automatically uses the full stars when the channel is in utf-8 mode.

What encoding are you using ?

[eridius]

stephen: /itunes behaves exactly as it should. If your outgoing encoding is set to UTF-8, it will use UTF-8 stars. However, if your outgoing encoding is *not* set to UTF-8, then it will use simple asterisks instead.

Perhaps you like to live in a world where only english-speaking people can talk on the internet, and even then, not use the occasional accented word, like "résumé"? Face it: the world demands non-ASCII text. Unfortunately, IRC, a popular protocol, has no provision for defining the encoding of sent text. This means that we have to develop kludgy solutions. The one used in Colloquy is a simple popup (check your toolbar) that lets you set the encoding of the chat room - this is used to interpret incoming text and to format outgoing text. If you are in a chat room with a bunch of people who don't understand UTF-8, try setting the encoding of that chat room to something else - I'd suggest ISO-Latin-1 as a good default when you know UTF-8 won't work.