From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 Galeon/1.2.6 (X11; Linux i686; U;) Gecko/20020827 Description of problem: When writing norwegian characters in X-Chat, the other side sees them as garbled text when they are using ISO-8859-1 (in all honesty, 99,9% do!). Shouldn't the program be running in non-UTF mode?
possible workaraound: 1. move xchat to xchat.bin 2. create a shell-script xchat: ---snip #!/bin/sh unset LANG xchat.bin ----snip end not nice but works for me...
The problem ist true for german umlauts, too. Also the fix works for me.
No, this is not a bug. When people communicate over IRC, and are using non-ASCII text, then everyone who is involved in the communication must use the same 8bit encoding. The IRC protocol does not specify any specific encoding, other than that it must be 8bit. As such, if you are using UTF-8, and someone else is not, they will rightfully see garbled characters. The solution, is either for them to configure their client to use UTF-8 as well, or for you to configure your client to use the encoding that they are using. This is something that can _only_ be done by the persons involved in communication, and is not something that can be autodetected or otherwise occur without user intervention. The same thing occurs if one user is using ISO8859-1, and another user is using ISO8859-9 or some other encoding. The only difference with UTF-8 is that non-ASCII characters are encoded as a multiple byte stream of up to 6 bytes depending on where the characters fall into unicode space. So a single foreign non-ASCII character encoded as UTF-8, might appear on another computer as 2-6 bytes of random garbage if the other computer is using ISO8859-x or some other 8 bit encoding. Again, this isn't a bug - things are working very much the way they should be. Configure your xchat client to use the same encoding that others you communicate with are using, or convince everyone else to use UTF-8, or just deal with the inconvenience until everyone is using UTF-8. Either way, there isn't anything that software can do about it. Closing as NOTABUG
This "issue" is being reported a LOT lately, and it's consuming a rather large amount of time merely to just respond to people and explain the reason why it is not a bug, and why it is expected behaviour that two people communicating through networking, or two applications exchanging text must agree upon an encoding to use that they both understand. Since there is absolutely nothing that I can do about the 'problem', nor anyone else for that matter, since it isn't a bug, I'm making this bug as the master "bug to close future bug reports on the same topic as duplicates" against. The end resolution of all such problems in short, boils down to: "Unicode Growing Pains(TM)" Once all systems in common usage are using unicode by default (like most other operating systems have been for about 10 years), then issues like this will become non-issues, and internationalized text in Linux wont suck anymore. What would be really really nice, is if a new RFC came out for IRC which stated that any compliant IRC client and server for the new protocol *must* use UTF-8 unicode encoding for text transmission. That would solve the problem quickly. But I'm dreaming.... that wont happen. Oh well...
Reclosing bug report as duplicate... *** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 75280 ***
I added LC_CTYPE="fi_FI@euro" to /etc/sysconfig/i18n so that X-Chat will work OK.