IRC Teams (#221)

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IRC Teams (#221)

Tashi dele Rubyists,

This week’s quiz was suggested by Martin DeMello

A common feature in IRC-based games is the ability to create and join
teams. The game bot sits in the channel and watches for messages in a
certain format, which it interprets as commands. Write a small gamebot
that accepts the following commands:

create team
join
leave team
show teams
show team
show my team
delete team
reset

Here’s a typical transcript

create team ruby
- created team ruby -
create team python
- created team python -
show teams
teams: ruby, python
show team ruby
team ruby: foo
show my team
bar is in team python
join ruby
baz is now in team ruby
show team ruby
team ruby: foo, baz

Think up some useful extensions, such as the ability to join a user
rather than a team, and restricting some commands like reset to ops.
There are plenty of IRC bot libraries out there, go explore! If one
already does team formation, that’s cheating, though :slight_smile:

Have fun!

The main idea behind this quiz was to show how easy it is to get an
irc bot up and running in ruby, especially given the number of bot
frameworks out there. I chose to base my bot on rif
[http://gitorious.org/ruby-irc], a nice lightweight library with
everything I needed to get started immediately.

The code consists of a Teams class, which does all the actual work of
maintaining teams, and a TeamBot, which inherits from RIF::Bot and
handles the IRC part of it. For the sake of simplicity, the bot
frontend does no real validation; it just unpacks an incoming message
into a command and arguments, and blindly sends those arguments to the
Teams object. All public methods on the Teams object accept a player
name as a first argument, whether they need it or not, and return
either a string or an array of strings, or raise an exception. The bot
sends the return value to the channel; an array is sent one message at
a time.


gem ‘rif’
require ‘rif/bot’

class TeambotError < Exception
end

def TeambotError(foo)
TeambotError.new(foo)
end

class Teams
attr_accessor :teams, :members

def initialize
@teams = {}
@members = {}
end

def create(player, team)
raise TeambotError(“team #{team} already created”) if teams[team]
teams[team] = true
“created team #{team}”
end

def delete(player, team)
teams.delete(team)
members.delete_if {|k,v| v == team}
“deleted team #{team}”
end

def join(player, team)
raise TeambotError(“no such team: #{team}”) if not teams[team]
members[player] = team
“#{player} has joined team #{team}”
end

def leave(player, *args)
team = members.delete(player)
“#{player} has left team #{team}”
end

def reset(*args)
@members = {}
@teams = {}
“deleted all teams”
end

def show(player, *args)
if args[0] == ‘my’
members[player]
elsif args[0] == ‘teams’
teams.map {|team, _| “#{team}: #{show_players(team)}”}
elsif args[0] == ‘team’
show_players(team)
end
end

private
def players(team)
members.select {|k,v| v == team}.keys
end

def show_players(team)
players(team).join(" ")
end
end

class TeamBot < RIF::Bot
attr_reader :teams, :channel
def initialize(channel, nick, server, port, username)
@teams = Teams.new
@channel = channel
super(nick, server, port, username)
end

def on_endofmotd(event)
join(channel)
end

def on_message(event)
return unless event.channel == channel
msg, *args = event.message.split(" ")
player = event.nick
begin
*ret = teams.send(msg, player, *args)
rescue NameError
ret = nil
rescue TeambotError => e
ret = [e.message]
end
ret.each {|m| send_message(channel, m)} if ret
end
end

if FILE == $0
channel = “##{ARGV[0]}”
bot = TeamBot.new(channel, “teambot”, “irc.freenode.net”, 6667, “RIF
Bot”)
bot.connect
end

martin

This week’s quiz was solved by Martin DeMello.

Martin uses the rif gem to handle the nitty gritty details of
IRC, like establishing a connection and sending and receiving
messages.

The TeamBot#on_message method receives the messages from the users
and dispatches them to an instance of the Teams class. This is
accomplished by simply splitting the the message that was sent and
using the first part as the method to invoke. The first argument is
always the player, which is taken from the message event’s nick
field. The rest of the message, if any, is passed as the remaining
arguments.

Let’s look at a full pass through of the following sample message from
user Bob:

<Bob> create ruby

This will land in the bot’s on_message method. The event will have
“Bob” as the nick and “create ruby” as the message. That is parsed
into the method to call and the arguments like so:

msg, *args = event.message.split(" ")

The teams object is then sent the parsed message arguments with the
specified method as follows:

*ret = teams.send(msg, player, *args)

This takes us into the create method and the team is created (if all
goes according to plan):

def create(player, team)
  raise TeambotError("team #{team} already created") if teams[team]
  teams[team] = true
  "created team #{team}"
end

The other actions that users may wish to perform are taken care of in
the same way. This simple and flexible solution allows for easy
modification and extension.

Thank you Martin for your solution (and also for the quiz suggestion)!

IRC Teams (#221) - Solutions