Shoutbox

Hi,

We recently launched an MSN bot provisioned by Microsoft. The bot has nothing to do with Plus!. It accepts several commands, but some users have problems with it. After investigation we noticed these users have control characters (#x1 to #x19) in their messages. These characters are appended by the Messenger Plus! plugin. For example when adding color to text in a message box, or making text bold. A control character can be followed with a parameter, for example to specify which colour. To reply to such messages properly, we need the actual message without the mark up.

One option is to remove the control characters, but then their parameters will still be present in the message. Therefore these parameters must also be removed from the message. But then we need to know which characters are parameters, and which are not. But the we need to know what the syntax is.

For example
(#x3)5Hello(#x3)
(#x3 is a control character)
This displays a dark red 'Hello' message, because the parameter '5' is linked to this color. The control character #x3 is used twice, presumably one to start the color mode, and one to end it.

Is there somewhere a list where this syntax is specified? With this list we can remove all the mark up, to process incoming messages properly.

But in the future this syntax could be altered or extended. Therefore Messenger Plus! could choose to remove mark up itself when sending messages to clients which have an official bot status, like our bot.

Removing markup is important, because our bot responds to keywords. With our bot it's also possible to send SMS text messages. Sending such text messages with control characters in it is not what our customers want.