The IRC protocol is infested with annoyances. One of these is parsing the messages sent to the client by the server. This is a problem I needed to solve when developing IRC Tools. Without a proper parsing mechanism, the entire set of libraries would be completely useless. How did I do it? Read on!
So apparently I've been busy lately and haven't moved beyond the "infant blog stage" in my blog life. Lucky for me (and you too?), some of the things that have been keeping me busy are relevant to this blog. Recently I've been putting a lot of work into IRC Tools, specifically the client library.
The core of the client library is there and working (parsing messages, handling them, and sending commands). Currently I'm implementing various classes to handle different incoming message types (e.g. the MODE message, or various numeric replies) and classes for outgoing commands. While working on these classes, I've come to the conclusion that the IRC protocol is terrible. It is vague and inconsistent, with different server implementations often creating contradictions in the way certain circumstances should be handled. Let's proceed with a small example.
