Irssi charset issues

For future reference, mostly to myself, here's how to get irssi working properly with utf-8 terminals, on latin1 channels, through screen.

1. Make sure your terminal is utf-8.

Putty: In the Window->Translation page of the Session configuration, change "Received data assumed to be in which character set" to "UTF-8".

urxvt: Seems to be Utf-8 by default when the locale is. Check "locale". It should look something like this:

LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NAME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ADDRESS="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TELEPHONE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MEASUREMENT="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_IDENTIFICATION="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

2. Start screen in UTF-8 mode

screen -U is your friend. It is possible to switch this live using C-a followed by :utf8 on.

3. Irssi.

• Never ever use irssi 0.8.12 (default in ubuntu for several revisions). If you use ubuntu older than 9.10, install irssi from source (or apropriate .deb if you can find one, I didn't).
• Set the following options:
  /set term_charset utf-8
  /set recode_out_default_charset iso8859-1
  /set recode transliterate off
  /set recode fallback iso8859-1
  /set recode on
• The above assumes all channels you use on the server has latin1. To only set latin1 recode for a single channel use /recode add #channel iso8859-1

4. Joining a channel with latin1 characters in the name.

This is the tricky bit, and I've yet to find a good solution for it. My best tip so far is to add it to the autojoin list before starting irssi. In ~/.irssi/config add/modify the channels setting:

channels = (
{
  name = "#blåbær";
  chatnet = "IRCNet";
  autojoin = "yes";
  },
);

Of course, you will need to edit the file with an editor that saves the file as a latin1 file.