Question

I’d like to be able to retrieve a users Google Talk Status Message with Python, it’s really hard to find documentation on how to use some of the libraries out there.

Answer 1

I don’t have anything to hand with xmpp installed, but here’s some old code I had lying around that might help you. You’ll want to update the USERNAME/PASSWORD to your own values for test purposes.

Things to note: users logged in to Google Talk get a random presence string on their userid: that doesn’t matter if you are trying to get the status of some other user, but if you want to write some code so want to communicate with yourself you need to distinguish the user logged in from GMail or a GTalk client from the test program. Hence the code searches through the userids.

Also, if you read the status immediately after logging in you probably won’t get anything. There’s a delay in the code because it takes a little while for the status to become available.

"""Send a single GTalk message to myself"""

import xmpp
import time

_SERVER = 'talk.google.com', 5223
USERNAME = '[e-mail]'
PASSWORD = 'whatever'


def sendMessage(tojid, text, username=USERNAME, password=PASSWORD):
    jid = xmpp.protocol.JID(username)
    client = xmpp.Client(jid.getDomain(), debug=[])
    #self.client.RegisterHandler('message', self.message_cb)
    if not client:
      print 'Connection failed!'
      return
    con = client.connect(server=_SERVER)
    print 'connected with', con
    auth = client.auth(jid.getNode(), password, 'botty')
    if not auth:
      print 'Authentication failed!'
      return
    client.RegisterHandler('message', message_cb)
    roster = client.getRoster()
    client.sendInitPresence()
    if '/' in tojid:
        tail = tojid.split('/')[-1]
        t = time.time() + 1
        while time.time() < t:
            client.Process(1)
            time.sleep(0.1)
            if [ res for res in roster.getResources(tojid) if res.startswith(tail) ]:
                break
        for res in roster.getResources(tojid):
            if res.startswith(tail):
                tojid = tojid.split('/', 1)[0] + '/' + res

    print "sending to", tojid
    id = client.send(xmpp.protocol.Message(tojid, text))
    t = time.time() + 1
    while time.time() < t:
        client.Process(1)
        time.sleep(0.1)
    print "status", roster.getStatus(tojid)
    print "show", roster.getShow(tojid)
    print "resources", roster.getResources(tojid)
    client.disconnect()

def message_cb(session, message):
    print ">", message

sendMessage(USERNAME + '/Talk', "This is an automatically generated gtalk message: did you get it?")