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 French accented characters, the cyrillic alphabets, the Arabian writing and even 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.

The primary audience of this program are the European IRC users who occassionally talk on Japanese channels.

With the proxy, all you need is an IRC client that understands and speaks fluently UTF-8.
The proxy supports all the ISO-8859 family character sets, ISO-2022-JP, SHIFT-JIS Japanese encodings and the UTF-8 unicode encoding, and will transparently use them with the "in Rome, do like the Romans do" principle.

Note: As of version 1.4.2, UTF-8 is not the only supported client encoding, but it is still the only recommended one.

In version 1.5.0, better coverage for different ISO-2022-jp escape phases was added (notably, support for thin katakana).

To install iconvircproxy, follow the following instructions:

1. Download it:
   

   wget http://bisqwit.iki.fi/src/arch/iconvircproxy-1.5.0.tar.bz2

2. Extract it:
   

   tar xvfj iconvircproxy-1.5.0.tar.bz2

3. Compile it:
   

   cd iconvircproxy-1.5.0
   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.

To install iconvircproxy, follow the following instructions:

1. Download it:
   

   wget http://bisqwit.iki.fi/src/arch/iconvircproxy-1.5.0-win32.zip

2. Extract it:
   

   unzip iconvircproxy-1.5.0.zip

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 localhost:6622

If you are running the program in some other machine than the same where the irc client is ran, replace localhost with the address of the host. Replace the number 6622 with the port you specified in the listen_port setting in the configuration file.

Note that your IRC client / terminal must be fluent in UTF-8.

For a list of IRC clients supporting UTF-8, see http://freedesktop.org/Software/IrcClients.

Also, IrcII will also soon support UTF-8.

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. The server might also be full, try again later.

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? If this text shows as squares: わたなべ, you don't. 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. If you use "screen", you must attach the screen with the -U option.

Q: Japanese text displays fine, but how can I type it?
A: You need an input method editor such as kinput2. Assuming you have it installed, you need to start your terminal with a command line such as this: XMODIFIERS=@im=kinput2 LANGUAGE=C LC_ALL=ja_JP.UTF-8 gnome-terminal

Q: "Could not connect to host."
A: Check your firewall settings.
Disclaimer: I have tested the Windows version only under Wine, where it seems to work fine.

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

This means that you are free to use for whatever purpose you want to as long as you wish, free to analyze the source code, free to modify it to suit your needs, free to create derived works of it, free to sell it if you want to, but there is no warranty and if you distribute it, you are not allowed to restrict these freedoms.

If you modify the source code or create derived works of it, you are encouraged to share your creations with the original author: ox@Joeleje Ylie18rRluomcszea <bi4nsqwissegt@ikei.fi>

GNU make and C++ compiler is required to recompile the source code.
For running the program, there are no external requirements.
GCC version 3.3 or greater is required.

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