Working on my latest pet-project (web irc client and server using comet, ajax and a newly written async php socket daemon which can hande the many hanging iframe get’s aka comet connections) i’m trying to offload as much of the logic as posible to the client side.. The more work the client has to do, the easier and more scalable the server will be.

I didn’t want the non-blocking server to constantly choking down every text message that’s being send to the (potentially hundreds off-) clients, so i implimented the mIRC style and color parsing in javascript, so the individual web browsers can deal with this, and offload the server..

The basics of it are relatively easy, just parse thru the string one character at a time, and if a mIRC control code is found, modify the string accordingly (apply either a color, underline, bold or reverse). An article explaining the codes in mIRC can be found here

The code can be found here: mIRC coloring in javascript