Choosing a Python IRC library

30Jul14

irc

Looks complex to begin with but ended up being effective enough to not consider other libraries.

Connecting is as simple as the following:

import irc.client

client = irc.client.IRC()
server = client.server()
server.connect('localhost', 6667, 'test')

Then because it’s event driven you call:

client.process_once()

in your event loop to keep communication flowing.

Whenever you wish to perform an action on IRC you use the server object to trigger it, for example:

server.join('#test')
server.privmsg('nickserv', 'identify password1')

To respond to events, set event handling functions with server.add_global_handler e.g.

server.add_global_handler("welcome", on_connect)

There’s a list of the possible events in the source for events.py. Here are some common ones:

    "error",
    "join",
    "kick",
    "mode",
    "part",
    "ping",
    "privmsg",
    "privnotice",
    "pubmsg",     # privmsg to channel
    "pubnotice",  # notice to channel
    "quit",
    "invite",
    "pong",
    "action",
    "topic",
    "nick",

An event handler looks like this:

def on_connect(server_connection, event):
    # event has the following properties:
    event.arguments
    event.source
    event.target
    event.type
    server_connection.join('#test')

One unexpected behaviour to note is the library uses ‘pubmsg’ to represent a privmsg to a channel.

Additionally, there are some example scripts that can help you get started.

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Tags: guide, IRC, python, tutorial