IRC proxy with transparent character set conversion

In an ideal world, everyone would use UTF-8 for text transmission. UTF-8 supports nearly all characters of all languages, including the thousands of ideographs from Chinese.

However, in the world we live in, people use different encodings. Finnish people use ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 or Windows-1252; Japanese people use ISO-2022-JP, SHIFT-JIS or EUC-JP; Polish people use ISO-8859-2, and so on. People using different encodings will see other people's text as an unreadable mess of code.

This proxy is a solution for IRC users who want to be able to talk with everyone despite of their character set differences. It's primary audience is Finnish, English and Swedish users who occassionally talk on Japanese channels, but it may be useful for others too.

With the proxy, all you need is an IRC client that understands and speaks fluently UTF-8.
When you talk in Finnish, people will see your text in ISO-8859-1, which is what they usually want.
When you talk in Japanese, people will see your text in ISO-2022-JP, which is what they usually want.
And whenever people talk in ISO-8859-1, SHIFT-JIS, ISO-2022-JP or UTF-8, your IRC client will only see UTF-8 and will be happy about it - and you will be happy because you don't have to bother changing character sets all time when you move from language environment to another.

To install iconvircproxy, follow the following instructions:

1. Download it:
   

   wget http://bisqwit.iki.fi/src/arch/iconvircproxy-1.3.0.tar.bz2

2. Extract it:
   

   tar xvfj iconvircproxy-1.3.0.tar.bz2

3. Compile it:
   

   cd iconvircproxy-1.3.0
   make

You may now delete all files from the working directory except ircproxy.cfg and iconvircproxy.

To configure iconvircproxy, edit the ircproxy.cfg file and adjust the settings as you see fit. The default settings are ok for most IRCNet users.

Run iconvircproxy:

./iconvircproxy

After iconvircproxy has been started, connect your IRC client to the computer the proxy is running at. In most IRC clients, this command will do it:

/server your.host.name:6622

Replace the number 6622 with the port you specified in the listen_port setting in the configuration file.

Currently at least Irssi and X-Chat have full support for UTF-8.
Support is also coming to IrcII.

Q: I get a "too many user connections" message.
A: This message comes from your IRC server. You can try to find a less restrictive IRC server.

Q: Everything else works fine, but Japanese characters show as squares.
A: Do you have a Japanese font (such as MS Gothic or Watanabe) installed? You do? Does your terminal program (the window where the text appears in) support the Japanese symbols? Most terminal programs (and mIRC) only support one 256-character font even when they're interpreting UTF-8.
X-Chat does not have this problem. For Linux users, gnome-terminal is a good UTF-8 -compatible terminal with no XIM/font problems. For Windows, a good UTF-8 compatible ssh client is still to be found. PuTTY doesn't qualify.

iconvircproxy has been written by Joel Yliluoma, a.k.a. Bisqwit,
and is distributed under the terms of the General Public License (GPL).

For compiling of this program, GNU make is probably required.

The official home page of iconvircproxy is at http://iki.fi/bisqwit/source/iconvircproxy.html.
Check there for new versions.