Programming Jabber

Maintaining the keyword dictionary

To maintain this dictionary, we will use two subroutines to add words to and remove words from a user’s word list. These subroutines are called when a command such as watch or ignore is recognized in the callback subroutine that handles incoming <message/> elements:

def addword(jid, word):
    if not keywords.has_key(jid):
        keywords[jid] = {}
    keywords[jid][word] = 1

def delword(jid, word):
    if keywords.has_key(jid):
        if keywords[jid].has_key(word):
            del keywords[jid][word]

A string representation of the JID (in jid) of the correspondent giving the command is passed to the subroutines along with the word or phrase specified (in word) by the user. The dictionary has two levels: the first level is keyed by the JID, and the second by word or phrase. We use a dictionary, rather than an array, at the second level simply to make removal of words and phrases easier.