Difficulty in building an irc bot via Bot::BasicBot

Question

Hi,

I am completely new to Perl. I am trying to build a basic IRC bot.

In the module Bot::BasicBot, what does the line my ($self, $message) = @_; in the "said" function mean? I do know that my is for private, and @_ is the array for receiving parameters in the function, but how is a hash reference passed here?

Also, how do I access the parameters "who", "address", "body"? Thanks.

Answer 1

Well, these are Perl basics. You should start learning it first before you write bigger programs. If you know programming at all, this shouldn't take that long. Although I answer your question I really urge you to do it.

@_ is indeed for arguments. $self is the object the said() method is called on and $message is the parameter which indeed is a hash ref according to the documentation. You get the values out of a hash ref via $message->{who} etc.

Answer 2

Read perldoc perlreftut for Perl references tutorial.