IRC is becoming an increasingly popular medium for communication. In this article, Peyton McCullough explains how to make Python and IRC work together.
I’m sure you’ve all heard of it – the modern miracle known as Internet Relay Chat, or IRC. It allows geeks, such as myself, to converse with other people from around the globe. While you can connect to it with a vanilla client, you can also connect to it with another miracle – Python.
Python can connect to a channel and act as anything you like – a calculator, a weatherman, a scribe or a silent occupant. In addition, it is fairly simple to make Python and IRC get along, contrary to what you might be thinking right now, and this article will explain exactly how to do it. By the end of this article, you should have a basic understanding of the IRC protocol and how to use it in your Python scripts.
To understand this article, you will need an understanding of the Python language and an understanding of sockets. You should also be familiar with IRC.
