Reading IRC chat room messages
The Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is one of the oldest and most vibrant group chat room services out there. The Haskell community has a substantially welcoming presence on the Freenode IRC server (irc.freenode.org) in the #haskell channel.
In this recipe, we will build an IRC bot that joins a room and listens to text conversations. Our program will emulate an IRC client and connect to one of the many existing IRC servers. This recipe requires no external libraries at all.
Getting ready
Make sure an Internet connection is enabled.
To test out the IRC bot, it helps to install an IRC client. For instance, one of the top IRC clients is Hexchat, which can be downloaded from http://hexchat.github.io. For a terminal-based IRC client, Irssi is a favorite: http://www.irssi.org.
Review the Roll your own IRC bot article on the Haskell wiki: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/Roll_your_own_IRC_bot. This recipe is heavily based on the code presented on the wiki.
