Twisted Network Programming Essentials, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Twisted Words

Twisted Words is an application-agnostic chat framework that gives you the building blocks to build clients and servers for popular chat protocols and to write new protocols.

Twisted comes with protocol implementations for IRC, Jabber (now XMPP, used by chat services like Google Talk and Facebook Chat), and AOL Instant Messenger’s OSCAR.

To give you a taste of the Twisted Words APIs, this chapter will walk through implementations of an IRC client and server.

IRC Clients

An IRC client will look structurally quite similar to the basic clients from Chapter 2. The protocol will build upon twisted.words.protocols.irc.IRCClient, which inherits from basic.LineReceiver and implements the many user and channel operations supported by the protocol, including speaking and taking actions in private messages and in channels, managing your nickname, and setting channel properties.

Example 12-1 is an IRC echo bot that joins a particular channel on a particular network and echoes messages directed at the bot, as well as actions (like /me dances) taken by other users in the channel.

Example 12-1. irc_echo_bot.py

from twisted.internet import reactor, protocol
from twisted.words.protocols import irc

import sys

class EchoBot(irc.IRCClient):
    nickname = "echobot"

    def signedOn(self):
        # Called once the bot has connected to the IRC server
        self.join(self.factory.channel)

    def privmsg(self, user, channel, msg):
        # Despite the name, called when the bot receives any message,
        # be it a private ...