irc-ctcp

CTCP (Client To Client Protocol) is a way of sending arbitrary data over an IRC network, which may include bytes not allowed in standard IRC messages. CTCPs are sent as a PRIVMSG or NOTICE, where the first and last characters as \001 (SOH), and special bytes are escaped by encoding them into a two-byte sequence beginning with \020 (DLE). CTCPs consist of command name (typically in upper-case) followed by list of space-separated arguments, which may be empty. One use of CTCPs supported by the vast majority of IRC clients today is the ACTION command, typically invoked with /me. For example, if the user foo in the channel #bar were to issue everyone in the channel would receive the message Other common uses of CTCP include requesting the name and version of a user's IRC client, their local time, determining ping times, and initiating file transfers (DCC). Characters are escaped as follows: All other appearences of the escape character are errors, and are dropped. See http://www.irchelp.org/irchelp/rfc/ctcpspec.html for more details.