Forums mIRC Help Apostraphes/Quotes

Hi there!

I have been having an ongoing issue with MIRC. I have updated from version 6.35 to 7.19, and then to 7.22 last night, and had this issue with all three versions.

MIRC will be fine for awhile, and then after some time the apostrophes and quotations will appear like circumflex a's to some (â). This change also affects a color script I use (switchblade.ini) so that it no longer recognizes quotations and changes the color.

Rebooting MIRC fixes this issue temporarily, but usually breaks again at some point.

This isn't a matter of life or death, of course, but it's annoying and has been growing more frequent. (I had to reboot my MIRC twice last night).

All three versions makes me think it's a script problem, not mIRC. Are you running any scripts? In mIRC, type the following:

//echo -a $file($mircexe).sig $script(0) $dll(0) $com(0) $md5($mircexe,2) $version $os

Report the result here.

Regarding that response:

ok 1 0 0 912dfaee60f144853a33231688312686 7.22 Vista

I have a color/nick script that I run, but last night I disabled it, that did not fix the issue, and then I uninstalled and reinstalled, leaving the script unloaded until it happened once again, to make sure it was not the script.

I have made a little bit of headway. My friend that reported the issue the most has helped me poke around a bit, and she had UTF-8 encode/decode disabled. When she set that box in her MIRC, she saw quotes.

I know there is still a bit of an issue, as my color/nick script has a setting for main text, and quoted text. When this script is running, and this apostrophe/quote issue happens, my quotes no longer show up as the color I have set them as.

I know that sounds super complicated. I hope it makes sense.

Pressing ctrl+shift+" will toggle "smart quotes" for the "/' key. Depending on encoding, this also can appear as â or ”.

Additionally, I recently had to do a clean installation of mIRC 7.22 and I see some characters as blocks. I had utf set up correctly before I reinstalled. I used to recall a check box in the font dialog in addition to the settings, and a checkbox for multibyte edit box. I now only see the utf box in settings (it is checked), but the character still doesn't display correctly.

To reproduce: press ctrl+shift+" - now press ", what do you see in the message box? Copy this quote into mirc: ”. I see a black box.

Edit: I guess fixedsys just doesn't have that character. I have installed fixedsys excelsior so I have the same look, but more characters.

Note that since mIRC is completely unicode (UTF-8), it no longer supports non-unicode encodings (like latin-1 or other ANSI charsets). If you don't fully know what that means, just know that it means that some people on older/different clients might be sending text that mIRC cannot read. In those cases, text might appear garbled. There's not much you can do about this. If this was happening in 6.35 it was likely due to the same underlying issue (someone was typing utf-8 when you had it disabled, or ansi when you had it enabled). This might be why you say it happens "after a while", but it has nothing to do with a period of time, it simply has to do with the fact that eventually you will encounter someone who uses an encoding mIRC does not understand. It's possible that your apostrophe script is aggravating the issue by using ANSI characters when echoing the apostrophes. This would be an issue in 6.x but not 7.x. Again, without all the details it's hard to be clear what the issue is, but it sounds like some encoding issue that is probably out of your control, and the effect might be pronounced by an old script that is incompatible with 7.x.

It was the Ctrl + Shift + " thing.

Guess I just mash keys sometimes. Thank you all for your help!