Nick Character Sets

In UnrealIRCd you can specify which "character sets" or languages should be allowed in nicknames. You do this in set::allowed-nickchars.

Available UTF8 character sets
UnrealIRCd 4.0.17 adds experimental support for UTF8 character encoding.

Note that many Services packages do not permit registration with such characters. See also.

The following languages are available:

Available non-utf8 character sets
Table of all available "old" character sets (not using UTF8):

Important notes
A few notes:
 * The following basic nick characters are always allowed/included: a-z A-Z 0-9 [ \ ] ^ _ - { | }
 * Some combinations can cause problems and will cause an error. For example, combining latin* and chinese-* can not be properly handled by the IRCd and UnrealIRCd will refuse it. Mixing of other charsets might cause display problems. UnrealIRCd will print out a warning if you try to mix latin1/latin2/greek/other incompatible groups.
 * Most Services do not permit registration of UTF8 nicks
 * Casemapping (if a certain lowercase character belongs to an upper one) is done according to US-ASCII, this means that characters like &#246; and &#214; are not recognized as 'the same' and hence someone can have a nick with &#225;lpha and someone else &#193;lpha at the same time. This is a limitation of the current system and IRCd standards. Work is underway at the IRCv3 working group to solve this. People should be aware of this limitation. Note that this limitation already existed in channels (in which nearly any characters have always been available for use, and casemapping was also always performed in US-ASCII).
 * There is also no "similar looking character" or "identical looking character" checking. In particular if you enable cyrillic script (eg: russian-utf8) then characters such as cyrillic A and latin A will look the same. This could be abused to impersonate another user by using the identical looking character.

Western languages
For people in Europe and other Latin language countries (requires UnrealIRCd 4.0.17 and above): set { allowed-nickchars { latin-utf8; }; };

Or, to use the old latin1 characters in western europe: set { allowed-nickchars { latin1; }; };

Chinese language
This allows nick names to contain both Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese characters (GBK encoding):

set { allowed-nickchars { chinese-simp; chinese-trad; }; };