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iDirt has lots of strings with embedded color codes, especially if your zone authors are liberal in their use of color. Unforunately, there are also a number of places in iDirt that try to chop a string to a particular size -- and fail miserably, because of those color codes.

The following function is something I whipped out last night and then beat on some more this morning. It's use is to return a shortened version of a string with color codes into a new buffer and it ignores the following color code formats when doing so:

&BThe infamous blink
&+xSetting color x as the foreground
&-ySetting color y as the background
&=xySetting color x as foreground and y as background
&*Returning you to the default foreground and background

These are the only color codes in use at my MUD; looking at the code, it should be obvious how to extend it to cover other color code situations. 

char * strntrnc(char * dest, char * target, long length) {
    long pos = 0;
    long currLen = 0;

    memset( dest, 0, strlen(target)+1 );
    strncpy( dest, target, strlen(target) );
    while ( dest[pos] != '\0' && currLen < length ) {
        if ( dest[pos] == '&' ) {
            ++pos;
            switch( dest[pos] ) {
                case '*': // disable color codes; also fall through
                case 'B': // fall through
                case 'b': // blink
                    pos+=1;
                    break;
                case '+': // fall through
                case '-': // 1 color argument
                    pos+=2;
                    break;
                case '=': // 2 color arguments
                    pos+=3;
                    break;
            }
        } else {
            ++pos;
            ++currLen;
        }
    }
    dest[pos] = '\0';
    return dest;
}