I wrote an IRC bot in node.JS that logs a channel's activity to a JSON
file
reddit / irc

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sim642 · 2016-02-20 15:36

The way you construct the JSON [here](https://github.com/egladman/hero
dotus/blob/19e164cbe0b3521bb9e841a67639965f1e4d70ce/server.js#L31-L39)
is plain ugly. You should instead just properly keep a JS object in
the exact same format as you want your JSON output to be and then
simply writing it with JSON.stringify. You're doing some crazy string
concatenation magic which is nothing but confusing.

Logging the content of an IRC channel into a JSON object is weird as
well because:
1. You store everything in one file which gets massive and also takes
massive amounts of memory to store in RAM when your program runs,
2. Usually IRC logs are in plaintext, not JSON because that makes them
easy to append to without having to rewrite the entire file content,
making it possible to continue the same long in future runs of the
program.

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techieee · 2016-02-20 16:18

Thanks for the feedback!

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aperson · 2016-02-21 00:45

And for the love of everything good, use a standard logging format.

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tilpner · 2016-02-21 02:04

Which would you use if you had to decide on one specifically?

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aperson · 2016-02-21 02:26

Energymech is the most common that I know.

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tilpner · 2016-02-21 02:36

Having implemented a parser/formatter for energymech logs, I have to
disagree with that. :)

Energymech contains less information than other common formats, like
irssi or weechat. E.g. it doesn't have dates, only the time of day,
and it doesn't say what channel/query it's about.

When converting energymech/ZNC logs to weechat, that means you have to
pass in this context. In ilc I solved that with CLI arguments for
channel and date, optionally inferring the date from the filename, but
that was quite painful.

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aperson · 2016-02-21 03:22

Right, I was just mentioning the most common that I know, not the
best.  I'm just a fan of not reimplenting the wheel so other parsers
can be used that already can handle known formats.

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sim642 · 2016-02-21 06:51

IRC and standard are two things which don't belong together.

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tilpner · 2016-02-21 18:59

That was why I originally asked, because the "standard" loggings
formats don't necessarily qualify as "good" or "one of the best"
logging formats.

The irssi format is arguably better than energymech, but it only
informs about the date on certain *checkpoints* (Log closed, Log
opened, etc.), which makes the log harder to work with. Lines can't
stand alone, compared to e.g. weechat.

This doesn't mean it's a bad logging format, it's actually pretty neat
for reading as a human, but a hypothetical standard logging format
should (IMO, of course) also lend itself to being processed easily.