Forums Feature Suggestions Please add UNICODE support

I have a problem with dcc sending sometimes because the filenames have characters (Japanese writing symbols, hiragana and kanji mostly) that mIRC simply translates to ????'s and thus claims it can't find the file to send. If there's some hack to get around this issue I was unable to find it, but i think it should be an integral part of mIRC simply for the convenience.

It will be..

Khaled hasn't explicitly shared his plans for utf-8 support but I'd bet that he plans on making everything work as it should. Full support for unicode, however, does not happen overnight. In fact, Khaled started unicode support 2 years ago and there is still plenty left to do.

You can expect this issue to be addressed.. when, however, I don't know.

Unicode covers a lot more than just UTF-8! There's UTF-8 BOM, UTF-16, etc.

Unicode support is bad under windows...

UTF-8 is capable of encoding any codepoint in the Unicode range. UTF-16/32 cannot be used over IRC because they require the use of NUL bytes which IRC as a text-based medium does not support, meaning UTF-8 is the only viable Unicode encoding for IRC.

"UTF-8 BOM" isn't an encoding. BOM stands for Byte-Order Mark and is used for UTF-16 and UTF-32 to signify endianness. UTF-8 does not require a BOM (although it is sometimes used simply to show that the text is UTF-8 encoded).

+1 for unicode
i'm tired of copying & renaming files named in unicode before dcc sending >_<
also, why not just drop win9x support and fully convert mirc to unicode

This is the next major feature planned for mIRC. It's difficult to say how long it will take though - it's going to be the most difficult and time-consuming change that I will have made to mIRC since it was created. The mIRC code-base is made up of over 140,000 lines of code. Converting them to unicode will be no easy matter. I expect it will require meticulous line-by-line conversion and code rewrites and a fair number of private and public beta releases to ensure it is stable. A unicode version of mIRC will, of course, only work with Windows XP and onwards. It's a daunting project - which is probably why I've avoided it in the past - but I think the time is right for it, especially before I implement any of the other planned major features. I am actually looking forward to getting it done, despite the expected pain and suffering involved - it's been on my to-do list for so long that it'll be a relief to be able to finally cross it off and not have it lurking in the background any more :-)

Yeah uh...


I'll just leave it at that....

Is that your way of saying he's right? I think we all knew that anyway.

Any more info on when this update will be issued?

Khaled never reveals when an update is going to be realeased until the time of the release, and Feature Suggestions, while sometimes included, take a back seat to fixes for known bugs.

So... any news? I just wonder, should I add some unicode stuff myself (with external dll) or forget it and wait for unicode mirc release

I'd say that's dependent on how much of a hurry you're in. "Unicode mIRC" could be released in the next, day, month, (or even year depending on how difficult it is to implement, and how much time Khaled has to devote to the task).

I personally would not be surprised if it DID take another year