I'm not new to perl (not the best either!) but I can get around especially with CGI. I was wondering how I could use Perl to read from/write to PalTalk.

For those who don't know what it is, PalTalk is a chat client similar to AIM in a sense but there are chatrooms along with private messaging.

I want to essentially write a bot of some kind in the end, maybe a quiz bot that asks questions and posts it in the room and reads what everyone posts back and awards points. That might be a little advanced for now, but I would like to try to read the screen constantly and save it to file.

Any ideas on where to begin on connecting to PalTalk somehow to read the text in the screen and possibly write messages as well? I know there aren't any modules for PalTalk.

Would this be considered network programming? Any help or insight would be very helpful, even if all you can give are pointers on where to go and not any code.