iconvircproxy 1.6.2

iconvircproxy project is a proxy for IRC users who want to talk in different character set environments.

In an ideal world, everyone would use UTF-8 for text transmission. UTF-8 supports nearly all characters of all languages, including the thousands of ideographs from Chinese.

However, in the world we live in, people use different encodings. Finnish people use ISO-8859-1, ISO-8859-15 or Windows-1252; Japanese people use ISO-2022-JP, SHIFT-JIS or EUC-JP; Polish people use ISO-8859-2, and so on. People using different encodings will see other peoples text as an unreadable mess of code.

This proxy is a solution for IRC users who want to be able to talk with everyone despite of their character set differences.

The primary audience of this program are the European IRC users who occassionally talk on Japanese channels. With the proxy, all you need is an IRC client that understands and speaks fluently UTF-8.

The proxy supports all the ISO-8859 family character sets, ISO-2022-JP, SHIFT-JIS Japanese encodings and the UTF-8 unicode encoding, and will transparently use them with the "in Rome, do like the Romans do" principle.

Note: As of version 1.4.2, UTF-8 is not the only supported client encoding, but it is still the only recommended one.