Make it talk#

The most basic way to make the bot talk is to use its say() method. The wrapper knows the origin of the trigger (a channel or a private message), and it will use this origin as the default destination for your message:

# will send that to trigger.sender
bot.say('The bot is now talking!')

If you want to send the message to another destination, you can pass it as the second argument:

bot.say('The bot is now talking!', '#private-channel')

Instead of a string, you can use an instance of sopel.tools.identifiers.Identifier that can represent a channel or a user:

from sopel.tools.identifiers import Identifier

channel = Identifier('#channel')
nick = Identifier('Nickname')
bot.say('Hello channel!', channel)
bot.say('Hello user!', nick)

If you want to reply to a user in a private message, you can use the trigger’s nick attribute as destination:

bot.say('I reply in private message', trigger.nick)

And if you want to send a private message to the bot’s owner every time your rule is triggered, you can use the bot’s settings:

bot.say('Hi owner!', bot.settings.core.owner)

Note

The say method sends a PRIVMSG command to the IRC server. To send a NOTICE command instead, you need to use the notice() method instead.

Make it reply#

Now maybe you want to make sure the user gets notified by the bot’s message. For that, you could use trigger.nick this way:

bot.say('%s: ping!' % trigger.nick)

It’ll work fine and it’s a common usage. So common indeed that Sopel provides a shortcut for that:

bot.reply('ping!')

As with the say method seen above, the reply() method can send your message to another destination:

bot.reply('ping!', '#another-channel')

Also, if you want to reply to someone else, you can do that too by using the reply_to parameter:

bot.reply('ping!', reply_to=bot.settings.core.owner)

In that example, we send a message on the same channel, with a highlight to the bot’s owner.

Note

By default the reply method sends its message using a PRIVMSG command. You can set notice=True as argument to make it use a NOTICE command instead:

bot.reply('ping!', notice=True)

Make it act#

Besides talking, the bot can also act:

Oh, and let’s not forget about /me does something, which can be done with the action() method:

bot.action('does something')