IRC Bot

Hi guys,

I've started making a bot in php (run from the command line) for IRC. I am finding it fairly simple to do what i want except one thing. How do i stop my script from terminating once it has executed? I can connect to an IRC server and join channels but once there is nothing for the bot to do it just terminates. Any ideas for a main loop? OR are there any existing modules that do this?

Thanks in advance!

Not sure that PHP is the right language for this; it is not very good at event-driven programming. You will hit the maximum execution time if you have a loop; although you can alter that setting, it's still not an ideal platform for such an application.

OK... I may have a go in C. Having said that, how would i go about a php scripting interface for a C program.

Um, why?

What is this, a web application or a command line application?

Command line PHP scripts don't have an execution time limit, I think. Nothing wrong with doing this in PHP.

It is a command line application... And I don't think that is correct. Once i execute the script i can see that the bot has joined but then it disconnects once the script reach its end. I think PERL would be much more suited to this. But if i can do it in PHP that would be fantastic.

Well, the script should block on reading messages, not just end.

yeah... so... it's not reading messages all the time, so as soon as it is idle it exits.

Well, then you need to make it wait until a message is available. How do you read messages in the first place?

socket_read()? problem is i haven't got that far. There is not point working out how i'm gonna read new messages if i can't get the thing to stay alive.

Of course there is! Reading new messages is the key to staying alive. socket_read() will block until data is available, keeping your program alive. Then you process the data, act on it, and start over.

Code:

---

while(running) {
  data = read data;
  process data into messages;
  for every message {
    if message is control command {
      respond to message;
    }
    if message is quit command {
      running = false;
    }
  }
}

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