Message Character Limit

Just a small inquiry,

What are the character limits for privmsgs and whispers?

I noticed that when my bot was sending a command list to a user, the console printed the message but the whisper never made it. I tested it with a smaller message of maybe 10 characters and the message was received, so it wasn’t shadowbanned.

I tried this out - I modded my bot in my channel and was able to send a PRIVMSG of 500 characters max. Unmodded, I was only able to send a max of 50 characters.

As for Whispers, I believe it’s a 500 character limit.

Okay going to test this right now, thank you for the reply.

You are correct, <= 500 characters for whisper messages

This is based on the IRC standard. (Last paragraph)

The standard says characters, but most IRC clients use 512 bytes. Twitch’s limit is 500 characters excluding the new line characters. For ASCII one character is one byte, but other characters use more, some as many as 4 bytes. As such, you can have a message that’s 500 characters but 2000 bytes, which will absolutely break many IRC clients in one way or another.

Also Twitch chat is based on the older RFC 1459, although it doesn’t make a difference in this case.

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