On 14 October 2010 06:19, Ed Summers ehs@pobox.com wrote:

A question from an IRC/wikipedia newbie.

I've been experimenting with processing pubmsg events in irc://irc.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia (thanks for the channel btw) and have been noticing some control characters that I wasn't expecting to see in the message content. I've attached a raw line form the channel, where you should be able to see an 0x03 byte (ctrl-c) at position 60. There are several others scattered throughout the line followed by integers. Is this a character encoding of some kind that I need to decode, or some artifact of the IRC protocol that I need to handle?

Those are color codes. See for example http://www.mirc.com/help/colors.html

-Niklas

Ed Summers wrote:

A question from an IRC/wikipedia newbie.

I've been experimenting with processing pubmsg events in irc://irc.wikimedia.org/en.wikipedia (thanks for the channel btw) and have been noticing some control characters that I wasn't expecting to see in the message content. I've attached a raw line form the channel, where you should be able to see an 0x03 byte (ctrl-c) at position 60. There are several others scattered throughout the line followed by integers. Is this a character encoding of some kind that I need to decode, or some artifact of the IRC protocol that I need to handle?

Any advice/tips would be greatly appreciated!

//Ed

They are color codes, you could simply strip them, but rather you should parse them, since they are really handy for splitting the fields.