Do it with style

When the bot talks, replies, or acts, it can do so with style: colors, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, or monospace. IRC formatting works with control codes, bytes you can use to tell IRC clients how to display some part of the text.

See also

If you want to know more about IRC formatting in general and some of its limitations, the modern IRC documentation may be of interest to you.

However, dealing with control codes yourself is not the most dev-friendly approach, hence the sopel.formatting module. It contains various functions to help you create styled text.

Text styles

Let’s dive into examples, starting with bold() text:

from sopel import formatting

bot.say(formatting.bold('This is some bold text!'))

This will output a line like this:

<Sopel> This is some bold text!

You can use them with Python string formatting:

emphasis = formatting.bold('important')
bot.say('And here is the %s part.' % emphasis)

To get that kind of output:

<Sopel> And here is the important part.

And you can use multiple style functions together, for example with the italic() function:

word = formatting.italic('very')
emphasis = formatting.bold('%s important' % word)
bot.say('And here is the %s part.' % emphasis)

To get a result that looks like this:

<Sopel> And here is the very important part.

Colored styles

Colorized text is a bit more complicated, and Sopel tries to provide helpful functions and constants for that: the color() function and the colors class.

The color function takes a line of text and a foreground color. It also accepts an optional background color that uses the same color codes. The color codes are listed by the colors class, and can be used like this:

bot.say(formatting.color('Red text.', formatting.colors.RED))

The above example should produce this output:

<Sopel> Red text.

You can combine colors and styles, like this:

big = formatting.color(
    formatting.bold('WARNING'), formatting.colors.RED)
small = formatting.italic('warning')
bot.say('[%s] This is a %s.' % (big, small))

So you get a similar result as:

<Sopel> [WARNING] This is a warning.

If you want to prevent spoilers, you could be tempted to take advantage of the background color:

spoiler = formatting.color(
    'He was the killer.',
    formatting.colors.BLACK,
    formatting.colors.BLACK,
)
bot.say(spoiler)

And expect this (you need to select the text to read it):

<Sopel> He was the killer.

Note that not all combinations of foreground and background colors are happy ones, and you should be mindful of using too many unnecessary colors.