IRC receiving 0x02 value, treat as formatting?

Question

Once I register a nick with a IRC server (in this case Freenode), I receive a message like this:

:NickServ!NickServ@services. NOTICE IRCLIBtester :*IRCLIBtester* is not a registered nickname.

I have inserted asterisks(*) where the weird 0x02 byte is received. Since the servers 005 ISUPPORT contained

CASEMAPPING=rfc1459 CHARSET=ascii

I assumed the messages would be pure ASCII, but in ASCII 0x02 is the Start-of-text marker. Looking at how other clients (in this case HexChat) parsed the string I noticed they took it as a "bold-font" toggle, so the nick would be in bold. Is this practice? And if so, which format is this?

My first thought is RTF, but since I display the text in a richtextbox(C#), it should have parsed the 0x02 byte itself right?

Answer 1

0x02 is the code for BOLD in IRC. These are undocumented in the RFC (1459 and onwards) but can be found via google.

You may find other format codes here: http://forum.egghelp.org/viewtopic.php?t=3867