HII(5)

💅 HII(5) — the hii file formats manual, bestie edition

okay so this is the hii page from the File Formats Manual section, and it's literally all about the files your hii IRC client leaves behind. sit down, grab a strawberry drink 🍓, we're learning file formats.

✨ NAME ✨

hii — the output file format of the hii IRC client. that's it, that's the name, iconic.

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

the out files that hii(1) creates are made of newline separated records, one per IRC event, and the record fields are separated by an ASCII space character. no cap.

the first field is a timestamp from Unix epoch — the moment the event was received. all the other fields are essentially user controlled, and they differ depending on what kind of IRC event it is. so like, don't expect them to behave 🫶

ASCII format codes and non-printable characters get removed from all IRC events. but — plot twist — hii itself adds non-printable character suffixes as the last character of a record, and those are how it flags special classes of IRC events. the following ASCII suffixes are currently supported:

• acknowledge (0x06) — the event is a PRIVMSG or NOTICE sent by the own client. 👑
• bell (0x07) — the event is a PRIVMSG that either contains the user's nick or was sent directly to the user. 🔔

the log file created by hii uses a similar format. but in contrast to out files, each record there represents a PRIVMSG and contains at least three fields:

1. a timestamp (see above, same deal)
2. a channel where the event originated — enclosed in square brackets
3. an event source — enclosed in parentheses

also the log file format does not use any of those special suffixes. periodt. 🎀

🦋 EXAMPLES 🦋

an example out file might look as follows:

1553375834 [*] bob (user.example.org) has joined #hii 1553375834 [*] topic for #hii is: hii - harmful ii - https://github.com/nmeum/hii 1553375873 (bob) hi!  1553354847 *** alice has kicked bob: important kick message

an example log file might look as follows:

1552167885 [#hii] (alice) bob: hi, how are you doing?  1552168459 [#hii] (alice) did anybody hear anything from bob recently?  1552317088 [bob] (carol) hi!

look at those brackets and parens doing their little jobs 😭 so cute, so structured. 💖

💜 SEE ALSO 💜

• hii(1) — go read that one too, iykyk ✨

🙈 CAVEATS 🙈

NOTICE commands are not checked for mentions, because they're mostly used by bots (e.g. NickServ). highlighting requests for authentication et cetera is not deemed useful. so yeah — no bell for the bots, that's the vibe. 💅

and that's the whole page bestie, you ate it ⭐ this one shipped from Debian, dated March 15, 2019 — go forth and read your logs with main character energy 🌈👑