Forums Bug Reports UTF-8 and log files

So, this is my first bug report. Maybe its not even a bug and I just didn't find the option in mIRC.

Anyways, I was happy that mIRC finally had UTF-8 support and worked great until I recently looked into my log file to see many strange characters. I noticed that these characters should be german Umlauts like ö,ä,ü. I guessed this has to be an UTF-8 encoding problem since the weird chars showed up after setting mIRC to "Display and Encode" UTF-8.
So I switched back to "Default" and they were displayed correctly in the log file (also tried switching Font from Verdana to Times New Roman for "better" Unicode support)


These weird chars also appear in the Editbox line after setting Font to "Default" and switching lines with Arrow Up.


I'm not sure if this is a bug, but it would be great to get the chars displayed right in the log file.

This is the correct behaviour, this is normal UTF-8 encoded text. If you are using UTF-8, you will need to use a UTF-8 capable text editor/viewer in order to view logfiles that contain UTF-8 text.

It would make no sense to convert UTF-8 to "plain" text since that would require converting to a specific codepage, which could be either the codepage you've selected in your mIRC channel window, or your Windows local codepage, both of which could be quite different. There would be no guarantee that the conversion would work in those cases, and to make things more complicated you may have received UTF-8 text that is in a third and completely different codepage eg. Japanese, which would be lost on conversion.

These conversion issues are exactly what UTF-8 was designed to overcome.

Thank you, for your answer.

I have found the "bug" now. The problem was, that the log file was created with mIRC 6.16 and it seems it simply wasn't "ready" for UTF-8 encoding. After I deleted the old log file and let mIRC create a new one, it worked properly!