A Regular Expression For IRC Messages
reddit / irc

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mybuddymichael · 2013-03-02 17:21

Suggestions for improvement are most welcome.

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alientity · 2013-03-02 18:00

Very cool, I can appreciate the beauty of this, as I love creating IRC
bots and regular expressions :)

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Gr4y · 2013-03-03 00:37

I should learn regular expressions. They seem to be very helpful when
it comes to strings rather than doing it all by yourself.

Great post!

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aggrolite · 2013-03-03 04:54

I put off learning regular expressions longer than I should have,
simply because they looked scary.  But they're fun!

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M2Ys4U · 2013-03-03 04:57

[We](https://kiwiirc.com/) use this:

    /^(?:(?:(?:(@[^ ]+) )?):(?:([a-z0-9\x5B-\x60\x7B-\x7D\.\-]+)|([a-
z0-9\x5B-\x60\x7B-\x7D\.\-]+)!([a-z0-9~\.\-_|]+)@?([a-z0-9\.\-
:\/_]+)?) )?(\S+)(?: (?!:)(.+?))?(?: :(.+))?$/i

which is fairly ugly to look at, but supports [message
tags](http://ircv3.org/specification/message-tags-3.2), UTF-8 and
works on every IRCd we've come across.

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mybuddymichael · 2013-03-03 05:04

Nice!

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M2Ys4U · 2013-03-03 05:08

If you want to see it in action, [here](https://github.com/prawnsalad/
KiwiIRC/blob/master/server/irc/connection.js#L357) is the sourcecode.