Make it talk

The most basic way to make the bot talk is to use its say() method. The wrapper knows the origin of the trigger (a channel or a private message), and it will use this origin as the default destination for your message:

# will send that to trigger.sender
bot.say('The bot is now talking!')

If you want to send the message to another destination, you can pass it as the second argument:

bot.say('The bot is now talking!', '#private-channel')

Instead of a string, you can use an instance of sopel.tools.identifiers.Identifier that can represent a channel or a user:

from sopel.tools.identifiers import Identifier

channel = Identifier('#channel')
nick = Identifier('Nickname')
bot.say('Hello channel!', channel)
bot.say('Hello user!', nick)

If you want to reply to a user in a private message, you can use the trigger’s nick attribute as destination:

bot.say('I reply in private message', trigger.nick)

And if you want to send a private message to the bot’s owner every time your rule is triggered, you can use the bot’s settings:

bot.say('Hi owner!', bot.settings.core.owner)

Note

The say method sends a PRIVMSG command to the IRC server. To send a NOTICE command instead, you need to use the notice() method instead.

Make it reply

Now maybe you want to make sure the user gets notified by the bot’s message. For that, you could use trigger.nick this way:

bot.say('%s: ping!' % trigger.nick)

It’ll work fine and it’s a common usage. So common indeed that Sopel provides a shortcut for that:

bot.reply('ping!')

As with the say method seen above, the reply() method can send your message to another destination:

bot.reply('ping!', '#another-channel')

Also, if you want to reply to someone else, you can do that too by using the reply_to parameter:

bot.reply('ping!', reply_to=bot.settings.core.owner)

In that example, we send a message on the same channel, with a highlight to the bot’s owner.

Note

By default the reply method sends its message using a PRIVMSG command. You can set notice=True as argument to make it use a NOTICE command instead:

bot.reply('ping!', notice=True)

Make it act

Besides talking, the bot can also act:

• to join() a channel,

• or to part() from it,

• and even to quit() the server,

Oh, and let’s not forget about /me does something, which can be done with the action() method:

bot.action('does something')