irc chat servers do not support arabic NickName

So, i have an iPhone IRC client code that connects with IRC servers perfectly. I can join rooms, and i can chat in room with other users and i can do private chat as well.

I can send my chat message in Arabic, no problem. But there is a requirement that NickName is only accepted in English.

If i enter my NickName in Arabic it does not log me in. Its really important that i should be able to use Arabic NickName.

And emoticons in NickName is not supported as well.

I have also tried to connect with IRC servers using MIRC desktop application, but with arabic NickName it give an error of "erronous NickName"

I might be in wrong direction here, but this is what i am facing now.

Any help, info, may be pointing me to the right direction will be highly appreciated.

thanks.

Solution

IRC is an old protocol (think 25 years), and is from a time that internationalisation, and universal character sets did not exist. From the latest RFC on the protocol, RFC2812, a nickname has to be of the format:

nickname   =  ( letter / special ) *8( letter / digit / special / "-" )

A "special" is one of the following characters: []`_^{|}
A letter is a character from the latin alphabet, thus A-Z or a-z
A digit is one of the numerals 0-9

You cannot reasonably expect a server to support other characters or nicknames which fall outside these limitations. If your requirement is to be able to use nicknames outside these limitations, use a different (more modern) chat protocol.