The IRC_ENCODING variable defines which character encoding your irc network (the peers you chat with) are using in transmission. This setting is also applied for text that is loaded from scripts and text that will be sent to the server.
The default value is ISO-8859-1. Examples of common encodings: UTF-8 Unicode encoding, supports almost all languages ISO-8859-1 Most widely used "latin1" encoding. ISO-8859-2 Polish, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian, Hungarian ISO-8859-5 Cyrillic encoding: Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian ISO-8859-6 An incomplete Arabic encoding ISO-8859-7 Greek encoding ISO-8859-8 Modern Hebrew encoding ISO-8859-9 Turkish, Maltese, Esperanto ISO-8859-10 Estonian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Greenlandic, Saami ISO-8859-11 Thai ISO-8859-15 Latin1 revised, with Euro for Finnish and French ISO-8859-16 Albanian, Croatian, Romanian, Gaelic etc with Euro WINDOWS-1252 M$ version of latin1, overlaps with control bytes SHIFT-JIS Microsoft doublebyte Japanese encoding GB18030 Chinese multibyte encoding CP437 Old IBM PC, compatibles and Atari ST. CP850 New IBM PC compatibles and IBM PS/2. ASCII For American terminals in 7-bit environments. ISO-2022-JP Traditional 7-bit Japanese JIS-X-0208 encoding
You can get the complete list of available encodings with the command /EXEC iconv -l if your system has it installed.
See Also: set/display_encoding set/input_encoding digraph bind/enter_digraph