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IRC's in-band colour codes with names, plus a converter that turns ANSI terminal escapes into the IRC equivalents so console output can be relayed to a channel.

Version

0.4.1 zef:raku-community-modules

Depends

nothing outside the core

License

Artistic-2.0

Its own test suite

3 files, green

Checked

2026-09-15 against Raku++ 3.28.0 and Rakudo 2026.08

Where it lives

raku.land · source

Install it #

$ rakupp install IRC::TextColor

zef install IRC::TextColor writes the same store; either installer leaves the module usable by both engines.

What it is for #

IRC has no markup. Colour and emphasis travel as control bytes mixed into the message itself: byte 3 followed by a two-digit colour number, byte 2 for bold, byte 15 to put everything back. A bot that wants to highlight an error, or relay coloured build output to a channel, has to emit those bytes in the right order, and they are exactly the kind of thing that is easier to name than to remember.

This distribution names them, and adds the conversion nobody wants to write twice: a string that already carries ANSI terminal escapes, rewritten into the IRC equivalents.

Colour, style, and a bridge from ANSI #

use IRC::TextColor;

say irc-style-text('alert', :color<red>).raku;
say irc-style-text('alert', :color<red>, :bgcolor<white>).raku;
say irc-style-text('alert', :color<green>, :style<bold>).raku;
say irc-style-text('alert', :style<underline>).raku;
say irc-style-text('alert').raku;

say ircstyle('alert', :red).raku;
say ircstyle('alert', :bold, :red).raku;

my $ansi = "\e[31mred\e[0m and \e[1;32mbold green\e[0m";
say ansi-to-irc($ansi).raku;
say ansi-to-irc('no escapes here').raku;

"\x[3]04alert\x[F]"
"\x[3]04,00alert\x[F]"
"\x[2]\x[3]03alert\x[F]"
"\x[1F]alert\x[F]"
"alert"
"\x[3]04alert\x[F]"
"\x[2]\x[3]04alert\x[F]"
"\x[3]04red\x[F] and \x[2]\x[3]03bold green\x[F]"
"no escapes here"

The escapes are shown through .raku so they are legible; sent to a channel they are invisible and the word arrives coloured. \x[3]04 is "colour 4", which is IRC's red, and \x[F] is the reset that every styled run should end with. ircstyle is the shorter spelling, taking the colour and style as flags rather than as values.

ansi-to-irc is the useful one in practice: build your output for a terminal with any of the usual ANSI helpers, then translate it on the way to the channel.

The one thing to know #

An unrecognised colour or style name is silently dropped. No exception, no warning — you get the bare text back, which looks exactly like a successful call on a string that happened to need no markup:

use IRC::TextColor;

for <red purple cyan magenta crimson> -> $c {
    say sprintf('%-8s %s', $c, irc-style-text('x', :color($c)).raku);
}
say irc-style-text('x', :style<bold>, :color<crimson>).raku;
say ircstyle('x', :bold(False)).raku;
say ircstyle('x', :!red).raku;

red      "\x[3]04x\x[F]"
purple   "\x[3]06x\x[F]"
cyan     "x"
magenta  "x"
crimson  "x"
"\x[2]x\x[F]"
"\x[2]x\x[F]"
"\x[3]04x\x[F]"

cyan and magenta are the traps, because they are standard ANSI names and perfectly reasonable guesses. IRC's table spells them light-cyan and purple, so both come back unstyled and you find out when the channel shows plain text. A wrong colour does not take the style with it, as the sixth line shows.

The last two lines are the other surprise. ircstyle keys off the names of its named arguments and never looks at their values, so :bold(False) and even :!red apply the style. Building that argument list from booleans does not work; include the argument only when you want the effect.