Forums Bug Reports Channel/Private messages with $crlf

RFC 1459 - Internet Relay Chat Protocol

2. THE IRC SPECIFICATION

2.3 Messages

Servers and clients send each other messages which may or may not generate a reply. If the message contains a valid command, as described in later sections, the client should expect a reply as specified but it is not advised to wait forever for the reply; client to server and server to server communication is essentially asynchronous in nature.

Each IRC message may consist of up to three main parts: the prefix (optional), the command, and the command parameters (of which there may be up to 15). The prefix, command, and all parameters are separated by one (or more) ASCII space character(s) (0x20).

The presence of a prefix is indicated with a single leading ASCII colon character (':', 0x3b), which must be the first character of the message itself. There must be no gap (whitespace) between the colon and the prefix. The prefix is used by servers to indicate the true origin of the message. If the prefix is missing from the message, it is assumed to have originated from the connection from which it was received. Clients should not use prefix when sending a message from themselves; if they use a prefix, the only valid prefix is the registered nickname associated with the client. If the source identified by the prefix cannot be found from the server's internal database, or if the source is registered from a different link than from which the message arrived, the server must ignore the message silently.

The command must either be a valid IRC command or a three (3) digit number represented in ASCII text.

IRC messages are always lines of characters terminated with a CR-LF (Carriage Return - Line Feed) pair, and these messages shall not exceed 512 characters in length, counting all characters including the trailing CR-LF. Thus, there are 510 characters maximum allowed for the command and its parameters. There is no provision for continuation message lines. See section 7 for more details about current implementations.

emphasis added
_________________________________________________

If you type //say This is a $crlf test

mIRC will echo
which is obviously an incorrect echo. However, what gets sent to the server equates to:

/raw PRIVMSG #channel :This is a
/raw test

Obviously, /raw test will probably be an invalid command...and the server will so inform you.

However, had you typed //say How do I use $crlf whois $me, you'd not only see the incorrect error but your /whois information!

Therefore, we can say that //say shouldn't necessarily echo anything past the $crlf since no one else sees anything past it. It does not follow that $crlf should be removed; as stated above, it's part of the original protocol.