Forums Bug Reports UTF-8 encoding

Ah, I didn't realize this affected files as well. That said, I'm not entirely sure I agree-- I think that one could go either way. On one hand, a user might expect a file dump to be verbatim raw data, on the other hand, as I mentioned regarding windows, the debugging output is mostly meant to visualize the data, not necessarily provide it for copy paste purposes-- that's the flipside of the argument though. Users might get confused either way. Especially if they /loadbuf'd a debug.log into a window and it was raw byte data, because that would not display accurately inside mIRC. A discrepancy between "/debug file.log | loadbuf @debug file.log" and "/debug @debug" might be confusing. Similarly, users might get confused by reading a file.txt and seeing different data from a @debug window, and, depending on their editor, it might be parsed as utf-8 anyway, which would defeat the purpose of visualizing the data.

I see the /debug feature as more of a pre-scrubbed hex editor style view of the data from the server. It would be sort of like seeing the following view inside of a hex editor program:



It's a debug view, but it's not raw data. I also think it makes sense for mIRC to be consistent about the way it outputs debugging info rather than having special rules for different scenarios. Perhaps, however, a switch to display the byte data should be added so that users can decide on this one.