Question

I was working on an IRC-bot as a little Python project. The bot works quite good, but is unable to stay connected for a long time. After a while, it just prints emptylines to the terminal and then pings out (because it can’t process the PING from the server).

This bit of code handles the receiving part:

def listen(channel):
    while True:
        data = conn.recv(4096)
        print data
        if data != '':
            if data.split()[0] == 'PING':
                process the data

After a while, the bot just prints whitelines to the terminal and I have no idea why.

The full code is available here on Github: https://github.com/Silox/Python-IRC-bot/blob/master/bot.py#L101

Answer 1

Quoting from here:

When a recv returns 0 bytes, it means the other side has closed (or is in the process of closing) the connection. You will not receive any more data on this connection. Ever.

The server has closed the connection on you, probably due to a timeout since you are not replying to its pings.