Editing IRC (section)

==Character encoding==
IRC still lacks a single globally accepted standard convention for how to transmit characters outside the 7-bit [[ASCII]] repertoire.
IRC servers normally{{Clarify|date=July 2009}} transfer messages from a client to another client just as byte sequences, without any interpretation or recoding of [[character (computing)|characters]]. The IRC protocol (unlike e.g. [[MIME]] or [[HTTP]]) lacks mechanisms for announcing and negotiating character encoding options. This has put the responsibility for choosing the appropriate character codec on the client. In practice, IRC channels have largely used the same character encodings that were also used by operating systems (in particular [[Unix]] derivatives) in the respective language communities:
* '''7-bit era:''' In the early days of IRC, especially among [[North Germanic languages|Scandinavian]] and [[Finnish language]] users, national variants of [[ISO 646]] were the dominant [[character encoding]]s. These encode non-ASCII characters like Ä Ö Å ä ö å at code positions 0x5B 0x5C 0x5D 0x7B 0x7C 0x7D ([[US-ASCII]]: '''[''' '''\''' ''']''' '''{''' '''|''' '''}'''). That is why these codes are always allowed in nicknames. According to RFC 1459, { | } in nicknames should be treated as lowercase equivalents of [ \ ] respectively.<ref name="rfc 1459 2.2 character codes" /> By the late 1990s, the use of 7-bit encodings had disappeared in favour of [[ISO 8859-1]], and such equivalence mappings were dropped from some IRC daemons.
* '''8-bit era:''' Since the early 1990s, 8-bit encodings such as [[ISO 8859-1]] have become commonly used for European languages. Russian users had a choice of [[KOI8-R]], [[ISO 8859-5]]{{Citation needed|date=October 2008}}<!-- Some networks offer MacCyrillic under the name «ISO 8859-5». But MacCyrillic has virtually nothing common with ISO 8859-5, this naming confusion just indicates the depth of programmers' ignorance. --Incnis Mrsi --> and [[CP1251]], and since about 2000, modern Russian IRC networks convert between these different commonly used encodings of the [[Cyrillic script]].
* '''Multi-byte era:''' For a long time, East Asian IRC channels with logographic scripts in China, Japan, and Korea have been using multi-byte encodings such as [[Extended Unix Code|EUC]] or [[ISO-2022-JP]]. With the common migration from ISO 8859 to [[UTF-8]] on Linux and Unix platforms since about 2002, UTF-8 has become an increasingly popular substitute for many of the previously used 8-bit encodings in European channels. Some IRC clients are now capable of reading messages both in ISO 8859-1 or UTF-8 in the same channel, heuristically autodetecting which encoding is used. The shift to UTF-8 began in particular on Finnish-speaking IRC ([[:fi:IRC#Merkistö|Merkistö]] <small>(Finnish)</small>).

Today, the UTF-8 encoding of [[Unicode]]/[[ISO 10646]] would be the most likely contender for a single future standard character encoding for all IRC communication, if such standard ever relaxed the 510-byte message size restriction. UTF-8 is ASCII compatible and covers the superset of all other commonly used [[coded character set]] standards.