Encoding in outgoing messages?

[siberion[at]gmail[dot]com]

This might be considered a dupe of bug #53, but I don't think it's quite the same thing.

I'm talking to a lot of people in different countries and different languages - usually English, where the character encoding doesn't matter too much. However, in German and Danish, where special characters exist, MSN users on Windows can't see my messages properly, presumably because Bitlbee is sending UTF-8. (Unfortunately, none of these people would consider switching to another client, so that's not an option.. not to mention that I often run into charset issues on IRC as well.) It would be neat if there was a way to specify the outgoing character encoding on a per-connection basis, or perhaps even as an argument on a per-message/per-dialog basis:

/MSG my_buddy;iso-8859-1 Hi

Or

<Siberion> my_buddy;iso-8859-1: Hi

Or

/DIALOG my_buddy;iso-8859-1

The IRC client would send the encoding as part of the nickname, and Bitlbee would do the rest. Perhaps a 'set' variable could be introduced to specify the default outgoing encoding if none is specified in the nickname.

I'd be up for contributing a patch for that if you could let me know the best location in the code to do the interception and conversion.

~Siberion

[wilmer]

Hmm, somehow I completely missed this report so far, sorry.

Did you set your charset setting in BitlBee correctly? AFAIK MSN should support UTF-8 completely, there shouldn't be any reason to set an alternative charset for outgoing messages... In fact only the OSCAR module has real charset issues.