SlideE6B has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I'm pretty new to perl. I've been working on an AIM bot and I finially got one to work. The only thing is that he is kind of stupid. He only responds to certian things. If I could some how parse the data that the bot recieves I could make it more intelligent. Can anyone explain how this works or even suggest another way of doing it? Thanks.

edited: Sun Mar 9 15:04:32 2003 by jeffa - title change (was: Parsing Data)

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Re: Parsing user input for AIM bot
by xylus (Pilgrim) on Mar 09, 2003 at 06:52 UTC
    It sounds like you are trying to write a chatbot type program... you may want to look at the following nodes:

    Perl Alicebot?

    Dueling Alicebots

    And the following module:
    Chatbot::Eliza 
    perl -e '$_=$0;split??;chop$_;$;=pop@_;$;++for(0..9060420);$_.=reverse
+$;;print'

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Re: Parsing user input for AIM bot
by artist (Parson) on Mar 09, 2003 at 01:17 UTC
    Hi,
    What's an AIM bot?
    Also tell us what type of data you want to parse.
    You can use Parse::RecDescent for parsing natural language data if the format is somewhat defined.

    artist

[reply]
      By AIM bot I think he means a robot that hangs out on AOL's Instant Messanger service and responds to messages sent to it. Kinda like an IRC channel bot.
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Re: Parsing user input for AIM bot
by SlideE6B (Initiate) on Mar 09, 2003 at 04:58 UTC
    an AIM bot uses perl to logon to Aol Instant Messenger. It responds to users that instant messenge it. The data is a scalar. It is text. $msg. It might equal "How are you?" or something like that. It is all fine and dandy until someone says "How are u". The bot doesn't know how to respond to that. I would need to be able to parse the "how" in "How are u" into $parsed and the are in "How are you" into $parsed2 or something like that so I could say

    if($parsed eq "how" && $parsed2 eq "are"){
    $msg = "I'm fine. How are you?"
    }

    and give a responce. So basically what I need is to parse $msg at every space and create a variable for each one. Or something like that. Any suggestions? Thanks

[reply]
      I'm not sure that what you described above is the best solution to your problem, but this will take the message and shove the words into an array: 
          @words = split /\s+/, <DATA>
    print join "\n", @words, "";

    __DATA__
    How are you?

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      That prints: 
          How
    are
    you?

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      Note that the last word contains punctuation. To remove punctuation, change the first line to: 
          map { s/[\?\.\!]*//g; } (@words = split /\s+/, <DATA>);

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      Update: Added bit about punctuation.

      Update 2: Without a more thorough description or code to look at, a better solution might be to just replace common abbreviations with the full word. For example: 
          $msg =~ s/\bu\b/you/g;    # Replace "u" with "you"
    $msg =~ s/\br\b/are/g;    # Replace "r" with "are"
    ...

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