How do I check if a user is authenticated with NickServ using POE::Component::IRC::State in Perl?

Question

I'm trying to test whether a user is registered on FreeNode. nick_info() doesn't seem to return information about this, so I want to use $irc->yield(whois => $nick); and then grab the irc_whois event's reply. The problem is that I want to wait until this event is fired, so I created a global variable $whois_result and wrote a sub like this:

sub whois {
    my $nick = $_[0];
    $whois_result = 0;
    $irc->yield(whois => $nick);
    while($whois_result == 0) { }
    return $whois_result;
}

with the irc_whois handler looking like:

sub on_whois {
    $whois_result = $_[ARG0];
    print "DEBUG: irc_whois fired.\n";
}

Unfortunately, the event can't fire while the loop is running so this hangs. I'm sure there's a better way to do this, but I'm not familiar enough with this kind of programming to know. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

I run a bot on Freenode and resolved the issue by asking Nickserv the command: ACC [nick] *

Nickserv will then reply with a notice in the format: [nickname] -> [registerd nickservname] ACC [level]

Where level 3 means that the user is identified to nickserv.

Answer 2

The following applies to FreeNode at least (or any server supporting the identify-msg feature).

If you are reacting to a message (irc_msg, irc_public, or irc_ctcp_action) from a user, you can tell whether he has identified to NickServ by looking at the third argument ($_[ARG3]) provided to the event handler. It will be true if the user has identified, false otherwise.