+# 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'
+