I wrote three IRC bots in Python this last week (although one was a rewrite). They probably aren't very useful to most people, but I'm going to share them anyway in case someone finds them interesting.

The first one was prompted by Adrian, who is maintaining a countdown until his wedding as a factoid in Spinach. Since Knab doesn't actually support countdowns, it has to be updated manually. This clearly isn't the Right Way to do this, and so I hacked together a script which connects to IRC and teaches Spinach the updated factoid. I run this as a daily cronjob to keep the countdown up to date.

As is usually the case with Python, there was already a library for accessing IRC, namely irclib. It isn't documented very well, but has a couple example scripts which are fairly easy to follow. It follows an event based model, so you write functions which will be called when certain events occur (such as receiving a message).

The final of the Currie Cup was held on Saturday (which my team (the Sharks) won), and I followed the match online using SuperSport's live score site¹. I then thought that it would be cool to have the score announced on IRC when it changed, and since I was bored I wrote a simple bot to do this. It worked well, but was very simple in that it only supported one hardcoded channel and one hardcoded game.

Since I was also bored on Sunday I rewrote this bot properly. I added a subscription mechanism so that channels and users can subscribe and unsubscribe to games by sending the bot a command. It's mostly working except for listing the available games (since there aren't any rugby games coming up which means that I can't test it ;-) ). Games are specified by the ID used by SuperSport's site, and finding the right ID is currently a manual process.