Question

I am trying to canonize an input from a python bot connected to IRC.
My python script is as such: http://pastebin.com/St4A1vLf

If someone says “!help“, this appears in the command prompt (When I run the script at the command prompt).

:bot!~botty@112.443.22.5 #fish :!help

What I want to do is take the variable “data” and canonize it so it just shows the user’s nickname, i.e. “bot” so the staring colon ‘:‘ and the rest of the string (from the !~) is also removed.

After this, I want it to send the user who said “!help” a private message/query with “no help settings“. (I will add in the help commands later.)

Answer 1

First of all: The line you posted makes no sense as the command is missing. What you probably meant is

:bot!~botty@112.443.22.5 PRIVMSG #fish :!help

But why not use one of the existing irc implementations for python such as twisted-words? They allow you to handle certain commands (such as PRIVMSG in your case) easily.

If you do not want to do this, you need to parse the incoming message manually and extract whatever information you need.

Here’s a simple parser. line is one line received from the server.

def parse_irc(line):
    src = None
    parts = line.split(' ')
    if parts[0][0] == ':':
        srcpart = parts.pop(0)[1:]
        src = {'ident': None, 'host': None}
        if '!' not in srcpart:
            # e.g. a message from a server
            src['nick'] = srcpart
        else:
            # nick!ident@host
            tmp = srcpart.split('!', 1)
            src['nick'] = tmp[0]
            src['ident'], src['host'] = tmp[1].split('@', 1)
    cmd = parts.pop(0)
    args = []
    for i, arg in enumerate(parts):
        if arg[0] == ':':
            args.append(' '.join(parts[i:])[1:])
            break
        args.append(arg)
    return src, cmd, args

Here’s how the parsed lines look like:

> python ircparser.py 'PING :12345'
src:  None
cmd:  'PING'
args: ['12345']
> python ircparser.py 'NOTICE AUTH :Welcome to this server'
src:  None
cmd:  'NOTICE'
args: ['AUTH', 'Welcome to this server']
> python ircparser.py ':me!ident@host PRIVMSG #channel :hi'
src:  {'nick': 'me', 'host': 'host', 'ident': 'ident'}
cmd:  'PRIVMSG'
args: ['#channel', 'hi']
> python ircparser.py ':me!ident@host PRIVMSG #channel :!help me'
src:  {'nick': 'me', 'host': 'host', 'ident': 'ident'}
cmd:  'PRIVMSG'
args: ['#channel', '!help me']