Use ASCII KCODE to prevent problems like missing characters or matching failures when clients send messages in something else than UTF-8

1 files changed, 10 insertions, 1 deletions

diff --git a/bin/rbot b/bin/rbot
index 5872e3e1..b7a6207f 100755
--- a/bin/rbot
+++ b/bin/rbot
@@ -21,7 +21,16 @@
 # IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN
 # CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.
 
-$KCODE = 'u'
+# Most of the string processing across rbot is done against IRC messages, which
+# do not have a well-defined encoding. Although many clients are now using
+# UTF-8, there is no guarantee that an arbitrary string received from IRC will
+# be UTF-8 encoded. We have to force ASCII (byte-wise/charset agnostic)
+# matching because otherwise some strings can give problems: in particular, for
+# example, the bytesequence "\340\350\354\362\371" (that is the aeiou vowels,
+# each with a grave accent) will cause the string to be considered up to the
+# "\354" (i with grave accent) only: so either the rest of the message is
+# ignored, or the matching fails.
+$KCODE = 'a'
 
 $VERBOSE=true