[icqlib-dev] Re: icqlib

[Bill S. <we...@ri...>]

On Fri, 23 Mar 2001, Eric Peyton wrote:

> Got another question for you fine folks.
> 
> OS X is a fully Unicode and UTF-8 aware OS.  I currently pass all strings
> as UTF-8 and pass the UTF8String to you all, expecting that on the other
> end "the right thing" will happen.
> 
> Of course, it doesn't.  All my foreign users (i had six complaints this
> morning on this) complain about the fact that their umlaut and local
> characters get trahsed when sent across icq.
> 
> Does icqlib have a way of handling this?  Is there a special library I
> need?

Hi Eric,

Interesting you should mention this, currently I'm hacking the encoding
support in icqlib.  This is the first I've ever worked with character
encodings, so bear with me :)

The ICQ protocol uses the Windows codepages to encode strings, not UTF-8.
Unix, of course, uses a different set of codepages.  Icqlib has always had
support to translate between Unix's Cyrillic codepage (koi8-r) and
Window's Cyrillic codepage (Windows 1251) since Denis speaks Russian, and
just recently I added support for the Czech encodings from a patch that
was submitted.  Those are the only two translations we support right now.  
You'll need to translate the UTF-8 strings before you pass them to icqlib,
because icqlib is expecting the standard Unix ISO-8859-* encodings.

Another (probably better) idea would be to add direct UTF-8 <-> Windows
codepage translation code, and then icqlib would support Unicode natively,
which would be excellent!  I was thinking about this while working on the
encoding support.  

After looking around just now a bit, it looks like glibc has some
conversion functions you can use, look for 'iconv'.  Maybe we can switch
to using this in icqlib too, then we'll support many, many encodings.  I
don't have time to do this myself right now, and it will likely be a few
months before I could get to it, but I'll put it on my TODO list.  Of
course, we'd gladly accept a patch too!

Bill