A Perl script logs chat sessions
Minutes Taker
© Kheng Ho Toh, 123RF
The IRC (Internet Relay Chat) protocol lets you program bots as automatic helpers. In this month's column, we let a bot log a session and store the results in a database.
At conferences, when supporting open source products, or whenever you need to coordinate a large number of project contributors, IRC is still the number one choice among instant messaging tools. None of its competitors – Yahoo, Microsoft, or the open Google Talk protocol – have been able to send the dinosaur among group communication tools into retirement.
The Bot::BasicBot module, which I introduced in a previous article [2] with a thermal sensor, handles communication between a Perl script and the IRC server so intelligently that programming the bot takes fewer than 10 lines of code. Bot::BasicBot::Pluggable takes this concept a stage further by adding plugin support to your bots so participants in a chat session can send messages to enable them. If a plugin is triggered, it performs the task assigned to it and sends the response back to the chat session.
Desperately Seeking …
The CPAN module has a handful of fully functional sample plugins that you can easily enable with load(). Listing 1 shows an implementation of a script that joins an IRC channel and enables two different plugins.
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