IRC Style and Colour Parser

IRC Style parsing is ridiculously tricky as I found writing this for qwebirc. Besides the numerous edge cases, the spec is semi-ambigous (e.g. will the second x have a background in the string "^C1,2x^C3x"?). This implementation follows the defacto implementations of mibbit and xchat -- however if you want options to handle particular cases cases differently make an issue.

This implementation should work consistently in near any environment (IE6+) [with an es5 array method shim] and is well tested

Handles:

• Unlimitted nesting
• Colours (^C): Default outputs as

<span class="irc-bg3"><span class="irc-fg3">message</span></span>

• Underlines (^u): Default outputs as

<span class="irc-underline">message</span>

• Italics (^i): Default outputs as

<span class="irc-italics">message</span>

• Bold (^B): Default outputs as

<span class="irc-bold">message</span>

• Normal (^o): Default outputs as

<span class="">message</span>

• Escaping (^0): E.g.

ircStylize("^Bbolded part ^0 not bolded part");
// => "<span class="irc-bold">bolded part </span> not bolded part"

Note: the ^C/^u/etc isn't used internally - we only replace the UTF8 versions of the string see here

Usage

var ircStylize = require("irc-style-parser");
var Handlebars = require("Handlebars");
var jQuery 	   = require("jquery");

// Set template of ircStylize if desired called with {style: '', text: msg}
ircStylize.template = Handlebars.compile("<span class='{{style}}'>{{{text}}}</span>");

// Parse a message to HTML or whatever your template outputs
var $parsed = jQuery(ircStylize(msg));

Todo [ ] Make it easier to add/change a colour [ ] Remove ES5 dependency?