Building an IRC bot using PHP, need some help

Question

I am using the a SmartIRC library for this. What I need to be able to do is have the bot running and accepting commands from users, and also listening on a UDP socket. I get data sent through the UDP socket that I need to analyze, sort into MySQL tables and such. I need that UDP data to be available to my BOT.

So the problem is, whenever I open a UDP socket it listens to all the data in a 'while' loop. So it means that the IRC bot itself is un-functional until the loop is over and closed. I thought about using some kind of a multi-threading solution, but I am not sure how. I need to find some way to spawn a new thread of the UDP socket, and send that data to my currently running bot. ah, no clue.

Any ideas? Hopefully I explained it enough so you guys can understand what the hell I want.

Thanks!

Answer 1

I'm not sure why you're listening for data in a while loop. When I have used SmartIRC in the past I use $irc->registerActionhandler() for the user commands and then call $irc->listen( ) , that way the library handles it all for you.

Some good examples of using SmartIRC can be found here , hopefully they will help you.