Question

So I’m starting to write a simple procedural Python IRC bot from scratch (i.e. raw sockets) and I’m trying to work out the best way of designing it.

Usually I have a big ol’ while() loop that’ll sit there and push data received from the socket into a buffer and I’ll use a massive if/else statement to scan through the string (using regular expressions) to work out what to do with it. I have a feeling that I shouldn’t be doing that because it feels awful.

I decided to make a dictionary of regexes and their associated meanings, e.g.

regexes = {"^PING: (.+)": "incomming_ping",
           "more regex": "more meanings"}

and just use a for/in loop to search through the text and find out which regex matches it. I’ve gotten this far, and I the first thing I thought was “okay, i can just make each ‘procedure’ to be called when a specific regex matches into a function, and call the appropriate function based on the meaning. I’m either stuck with using a massive if/else statement, which i didn’t want to do in the first place, or I could use some sort of Pythonic ‘eval’, which immediately sets off alarm bells.

Either way I’m screwed, and I can’t think of a way to approach this without going fully OOP (I don’t plan on doing this at the moment, don’t ask why).

Any ideas?

Answer 1

def incoming_ping():
    pass

regexes = {"^PING: (.+)": incoming_ping,
           "more regex": "more meanings"}

Instead of strings, use references to functions.

ps. If you’re “serious” about the IRC bot thing, you might want to have a look at Twisted.