{Dev Tricks}

After 2 years of … non blogging … I’m back !
This time I stopped C# (Oh yeah !) and I’m writing a lot of Python ! (Oh YEAH !)

So to say HELLO I’ll present something useless : My Python IRC Bot. But this article should be usefull, so I’ll speak about the Unix Philosophy :
As Doug McIlroy said :

This is the Unix philosophy: Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

So my Python Bot is wrote like this, only ~200 lines of Python it has only two interfaces, and they are simple.

The first step is to start the bot :

./ircbot.py connect 'server' '#chan' 'nickname'

Ok the bot is connected to a chan, now you have to write some hooks, in yauib every action raise a hook in the ‘hooks’ directory, you can write a hook in any language you want. As a good start point I wrote a default hook for received messages in hook/pubmsg, simplified like this :

#!/bin/sh -f
s_login="$(echo "$1" | sed 's#/#__SLASH__#g')"
s_host="$2"
t_login="$3"
t_host="$4"
shift 4
arguments="$*"
command=$(echo "${1%% *}" | sed 's#/#__SLASH__#g')
if [ -x "commands/$command" ]
    then
    args=$(echo "$1" | sed 's/^ *[^ ]* *//g' )
    commands/$command $args
fi

You should read : “When a message is received, the command in commands/[1st word of the message] is executed.”

So now you can start to write simple commands in the commands folder, like the command say :

#!/bin/sh
echo "$*"

This command is 17 chars long, and now, without restarting your bot, try to make it say something on the channel :
you> say hello
bot> hello

An now you can start to write dauting ones …. like … display a readeable calendar of the current month like :

     March 2011
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
       1  2  3  4  5
 6  7  8  9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30 31      

Ready ?

#!/bin/sh
cal

As the binary cal is installed on you machine, (windows user, you can leave, now), that’s all, your’re done … sorry, it just work :p

Et voilà !

You have to keep the UNIX philosophy in mind :
– Everything is a file
– Write programs that do one thing and do it well

And you’ll be happy developers !

PS: You can download / contribute to Yauib on https://github.com/JulienPalard/yauib