Python is more portable than C, and a C development suite is nearly impossible to install on a computer you don't own. You are making this hard for yourself and me. The forum-goers here cannot help you with programming an IRC bot in anything other than python. Everyone (to my knowlege) here who has made an IRC bot made it in python, so it is pointless to ask for help with doing it in another language. If you don't know where to look you should search something like "IRC bot C" in google and maybe that will be more helpful.

I want to do it with Java because I'll need to learn it eventually for Web Programming. How do I program a IRC Bot in Java?

I feel that Python will bloat my computer and I also need to download it on my school computer if I want to program the IRC bot on he school computer. I feel that programming the IRC Bot in C will be more portable for coding. Where's the IRC Bot tutorial for C?

Java requires installing a massive JRE (50+ MBs) and JDK (157+ MBs), and is known to have many, many security risks. Python, on the other hand, is a very minimal language, coming in only at 17 MBs - both the development environment and the things you need to run what you make.

Also, it's unlikely that your computer will have a C compiler available. Most schools (AFAIK) don't have a professional C compiler available on their systems. Installing Visual Studio or MinGW on a flash drive is also a hassle, and can easily weigh in at over 1 GB.

Therefore, I strongly recommend Python, as it's extremely portable and very handy to use.

I feel that Python will bloat my computer and I also need to download it on my school computer if I want to program the IRC bot on he school computer. I feel that programming the IRC Bot in C will be more portable for coding. Where's the IRC Bot tutorial for C?

When C was first designed in the early 1970s, computers had extraordinarily weak processors. The first C programs did not have access to the tremendous abundance of power modern computers have. Accordingly, they had to produce efficient code simply to run at all. C allows you to produce extremely size and computation efficient programs as a result of this heritage.  The downside is that C development environments tend to be extremely large. As an example, the development environment I use at work hovers around 1GB all-built and takes over an hour to deploy to new computers. A more standard setup like that present on my home computer is "only" 863 MB. The python installation I have is much lighter by comparison, weighing in at a grand total of 107 MB.

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Areas where C generally is not the best choice include:

• Anything involving a GUI
• Anything involving network communications
• Anything involving heavy string manipulations

Areas where C may be a good choice include:

• Programs that maximize resource use
• Programs where development time is cheaper than hardware time (notably High-Performance Computing)
• Programs that have limited hardware (Your keyboard is probably running C, for instance)
• Programs operating at a low level in the system where higher level languages cannot operate

My emphatic recommendation is that you use another language such as Python for this project.

Now that that's out of the way, onto the C tutorial:

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To start off with, I'm just going to assume you have a C development environment set up. There are a lot of ways to do this depending on your system and a million different tutorials for it on Google. This one is straightforward to follow if you don't feel like using Google.

Secondly, we're going to copy this guy's skeleton code. His code is broken as shown, so I'll be guiding you through a corrected version of each section individually.


(Note that the following will not display properly in Chrome. Please use an alternative browser or copy / paste into an editor)

The first section in this code is what's called our headers section. It consists of a series of lines starting with "#include" followed by brackets and a filename.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <unistd.h>
#include <string.h>
#include <netdb.h>
#include <netinet/in.h>
#include <sys/socket.h>
The files in brackets are part of your C installation and all of these are standard on Linux systems.

The next section is only two lines long and declares our global variables:

int conn;
char sbuf[512];
The integer conn will be used to hold a connection descriptor. This will specifically identify our IRC connection rather than one of the hundreds of other connections your computer may be handling simultaneously. sbuf is a rather odd declaration you might not understand. What this notation means is that sbuf is an array large enough to hold chars. Array declarations generally follow the form "type name[size]".


    void raw(char *fmt, ...) {
    va_list ap;
    va_start(ap, fmt);
    vsnprintf(sbuf, 512, fmt, ap);
    va_end(ap);
    printf("<< %s", sbuf);
    write(conn, sbuf, strlen(sbuf));
}

This is our first function, yay! Unfortunately it's quite a doozy. This is what's known as a variadic function, which is to say it can take any number of arguments (within reason). Variadic functions are a more advanced topic than you're ready to handle, so we can ignore most of it for now. There are two things that you should note though. First of all, raw() returns void (i.e. nothing at all). That means that we get no information back about whether it succeeded or not. Secondly, the function write() as used here does not match up with the documentation you may see online. That is because C has some hand-wavy magic going on behind the scenes that says write() behaves like the function send() located in <sys/socket.h>.

int main() {
This is the single most important line in our code. Almost all C programs have a function named main() that is the first function called program executes. Don't worry about the few exceptions to this as they're all more advanced topics like variadic functions.

    char *nick = "EphraBoT";
    char *channel = "bottest";
    char *host = "irc.choopa.net";
    char *port = "6667";
   
    char *user, *command, *where, *message, *sep, *target;
    int i, j, l, sl, o = -1, start, wordcount;
    char buf[513];
    struct addrinfo hints, *res;

As before, these are variable declarations. Unlike the previous variables, they can only be accessed from within the main() function. They should be relatively self explanatory. nick is the nickname your bot will attempt to use on joining the network. channel is the name of the channel the bot will join. host is the server that will be reached, so on and so forth. The rest of these variables are simply technical overhead C forces us to carry around.

    memset(&hints, 0, sizeof hints);
    hints.ai_family = AF_INET;
    hints.ai_socktype = SOCK_STREAM;
    getaddrinfo(host, port, &hints, &res);
    conn = socket(res->ai_family, res->ai_socktype, res->ai_protocol);
    connect(conn, res->ai_addr, res->ai_addrlen);

The first 3 lines simply initialize variables to default values. In a more professional program this would be handled differently, but a more professional program would hopefully not use a language so uniquely unsuited to IRC as C.
The last 3 lines of this snippet are the important ones, as they connect to the server. There is enough behind-the-scenes magic happening with these function calls to fill a good sized book.

    raw("USER %s 0 0 :%s\r\n", nick, nick);
    raw("NICK %s\r\n", nick);

After the preceding function calls succeed, we are connected to the server. Now we have to tell it what we want our username and nickname to be. That's what these two calls do for us.

    while ((sl = read(conn, sbuf, 512))) {

This is our program's while loop. Every time we come back to this loop, it will read up to 512 bytes out of IRC and attempt to parse them. The loop will continue until forever (or the program is closed).


        for (i = 0; i < sl; i++) {

Translated: "For every byte we've read from the IRC server, do the following on it..."

            o++;
            buf[o] = sbuf[i];

Increment our counter to make sure we don't overrun our buffer space and copy the byte into the spare buffer.
           
            if ((i > 0 && sbuf[i] == '\n' && sbuf[i - 1] == '\r') || o == 512) {

The previous increment-and-copy procedure will loop until we hit an end-of-line character or we've run out of buffer space. If either of these conditions are met, do the following...

                buf[o + 1] = '\0';
                l = o;
                o = -1;
               
                printf(">> %s", buf);

C does not null terminate buffers automatically, so we need to do this manually to prevent our string routines from flying off into memory we don't control. Then we reset our variables and print the string we just received to stdout.

                if (!strncmp(buf, "PING", 4)) {
                    buf[1] = 'O';
                    raw(buf);

Now that we've received our message, we can process it. One of the messages we're expecting to get is what's called a PING. This is used by the server to make sure we're still connected. The proper response to a PING is a PONG. I also want to note that this is perhaps the worst possible way to ever respond to a PING.

Homework problem #1: See if you can figure out how PING/PONG messages work.

Homework problem #2: See if you can replace this conditional with something more reliable.

                } else if (buf[0] == ':') {

Now that we've "handled" our PINGs, we can handle all of the normal messages from the server. That is what this case statement is for.

                    wordcount = 0;
                    user = command = where = message = NULL;
                    for (j = 1; j < l; j++) {
                        if (buf[j] == ' ') {
                            buf[j] = '\0';
                            wordcount++;
                            switch(wordcount) {
                                case 1: user = buf + 1; break;
                                case 2: command = buf + start; break;
                                case 3: where = buf + start; break;
                            }
                            if (j == l - 1) continue;
                            start = j + 1;
                        } else if (buf[j] == ':' && wordcount == 3) {
                            if (j < l - 1) message = buf + j + 1;
                            break;
                        }
                    }

This section initializes the variables you'll be using to the proper values. wordcount will contain the number of words in the message, user will point to a string containing the nickname of the person who sent the message and command will point to a string containing the command name.

                    if (wordcount < 2) continue;

If there are fewer than 2 words, it's not a valid command yet. Go back to looping until we get a full command.

                    if (!strncmp(command, "001", 3) && channel != NULL) {
                        raw("JOIN %s\r\n", channel);

If our command is a particular server response code, join the channel we've specified as the default.

                    } else if (!strncmp(command, "PRIVMSG", 7) || !strncmp(command, "NOTICE", 6)) {
                        if (where == NULL || message == NULL) continue;
                        if ((sep = strchr(user, '!')) != NULL) user[sep - user] = '\0';
                        if (where[0] == '#' || where[0] == '&' || where[0] == '+' || where[0] == '!') target = where; else target = user;
                        printf("[from: %s] [reply-with: %s] [where: %s] [reply-to: %s] %s", user, command, where, target, message);
                    }

This is where we handle PRIVMSG and NOTICE commands from the server. I'll let you figure out how you want to handle PRIVMSGs, but in essence this is where most command options would go. PRIVMSGs are used to send both private messages and messages to specific channels.

If you'd like to implement more commands, Wikipedia has a comprehensive list of commands. This should get you started on simply connecting to the network and staying alive.

Any tutorials for programming an IRC Bot in Python for Windows? The link to the Python IRC Bot tutorial is for Linux.

Any python program for linux will also run on windows.
You'll just have to install the python interpreter on windows.
Just download it here: https://www.python.org/downloads/
I'd recommend you to use 3.4.2

WE ARE NOT A SEARCH ENGINE! If you need help installing Python on windows, a simple search will get you there.

Tutorials are also not meant to be followed by typing in exactly what they say; you should read a section, experiment, and continue when you understand the section.

The tutorial is showing setting up Python with the terminal. I want to know how to do this in Windows.

• Open your Start Menu.
• Go to Programs.
• Go to Accessories.
• Click on Command Prompt.
• Type in: C:\PythonXX\python, where XX is your version number. If you downloaded Python 2.7.x, this should be Python27. If you download Python 3.3.x, this should be Python33.
• You may now start programming in Python!

Ignore this: [/list][/list]