Help for sending unicode
PyLily has extensive Unicode support, in both names and messages. It will accept
Unicode input directly over the network using UTF-8 encoding, and also allows
for unicode-escaped input and output if on a terminal which doesn't allow direct
UTF-8 input or output.
Wide characters such as kanji and emoji are also handled properly, both in line
editing and in formatting tables or doing line wrapping where the display width
of the characters matters.
In addition to supporting direct input and output of these characters in UTF-8
format, PyLily also allows "\uhhhh" and "\Uhhhhhhhh" to be entered to specify a
Unicode character by its hex value. For example, a user could enter \u203c when
typing a message and it would be converted to "‼", a double exclamation mark.
Similarly, a user could enter \U0001f603 to add 😃 (a smiling emoji) to their
message. The "\u" prefix must always be followed by exactly 4 hex digits, and
"\U" must always be followed by exactly 8 hex digits, adding leading zeroes if
necessary.
Emojis can also be entered by name, by surrounding that name with colons. For
example, the 😃 smiling emoji can be entered as ":smiley:". Available emoji
names and their corresponding emoji can be looked up using the /emoji command.
See "/help emoji" for details.
If a user is on a terminal which doesn't properly handle Unicode output, they
can disable this output with "/set unicode off", in which can any non-ASCII
characters sent to them will automatically be converted into "\u" or "\U"
sequences. In this case, emoji specified by name will leave the name surrounded
by colons as plain text.