+ * IRC messages are not UTF-8: 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.