Recent Hacks: irc2wiki.pl and xchat-nick-pidgin-status.py

The Mono a11y team has weekly iteration meetings in IRC, and we post the logs to the Mono wiki. Our version of MediaWiki doesn't automatically prettify IRC logs, so for awhile I was using Jamie Zawinski's irc2html.pl to create HTML tables. Today I hacked it up to produce MediaWiki tables instead. I call it irc2wiki.pl. Fixes welcome (or better suggestions).

Also, I now live on IRC. Some people prefer to get me through IM, so I always have Pidgin running, but my online presence is mostly reflected in my IRC nick. I'm forgetful, so I kept noticing that I was "available" in Pidgin even though my IRC nick was "sandy|lunch", or that when I changed my nick from "sandy|brb" to "sandy" my Pidgin status would stay the same. I decided to automate that shit. Based on a bunch of useful code from Arstechnica's Ryan Paul, I present to you my first xchat plugin, xchat-nick-pidgin-status.py:

#!/usr/bin/env python

# Sets Pidgin status from XChat nick, assuming you use a style like:
# mynick => Available (status "Workin")
# mynick|busy => Away (status "busy")
# Hobbled together by Sandy Armstrong from code
# written by Ryan Paul (segphault) of Ars Technica:
# http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/pidgin-2-0.ars/4
# http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/29/send-twitter-updates-from-xchat-using-python

import xchat, dbus

# Describe the plug-in metadata for XChat
__module_name__ = "Pidgin Status Plug-in"
__module_version__ = "1.0"
__module_description__ = "Set Pidgin status according to XChat nick"

# Specify status ID values
STATUS_AVAILABLE = 2
STATUS_AWAY = 5


def nick(words, word_eol, userdata):
  # Get new nick
  if len(words)     return None
  new_nick = words[1]

  # Check for status
  pipe_index = new_nick.find("|")
  if pipe_index > 0 and pipe_index     message = new_nick[pipe_index + 1:]
    # set away with status message
    set_status("", STATUS_AWAY, message)
  else:
    # set available
    set_status("", STATUS_AVAILABLE, "Workin")


def set_status(name, kind, message):
  # Create a new saved status with the specified name and kind
  status = purple.PurpleSavedstatusNew(name, kind)
  # Associate the specified availability message with the new saved status
  purple.PurpleSavedstatusSetMessage(status, message)
  # Activate the new saved status
  purple.PurpleSavedstatusActivate(status)


# Initiate a connection to the Session Bus
bus = dbus.SessionBus()

# Associate Pidgin's D-Bus interface with Python objects
obj = bus.get_object(
    "im.pidgin.purple.PurpleService", "/im/pidgin/purple/PurpleObject")
purple = dbus.Interface(obj, "im.pidgin.purple.PurpleInterface")


# Associate the nick function with the /nick command in XChat
xchat.hook_command("nick", nick)