Responding to IRC messages

Another way to interact with IRC in Haskell is by using the Network.SimpleIRC package. This package encapsulates much of the low-level networking and also provides useful IRC interfaces.

In this recipe, we will respond to messages in a channel. If any user types in the trigger phrase, in our case "host?", then we will reply to that user with their host address.

Getting ready

Install the Network.SimpleIRC package:

$ cabal install simpleirc

To test out the IRC bot, it is helpful to install an IRC client. A decent IRC client is Hexchat, which can be downloaded from http://hexchat.github.io. For a terminal-based IRC client, Irssi is one of the best: http://www.irssi.org.

How to do it…

Create a new file, which we call Main.hs, and do the following:

1. Import the relevant libraries:

   {-# LANGUAGE OverloadedStrings #-}
   
   import Network.SimpleIRC
   import Data.Maybe
   import qualified Data.ByteString.Char8 as B

2. Create an event handler when a message is received. If the...