How to create an Irc echo bot

The example shows how to connect to an irc server and how to read and send data from the server.

import socket

def reply(privmsg, socket):
 """ decode the string with message,
     something like ':nickname!~hostname PRIVMSG my_nickname :hi'
     and echoes the message received to nickname """
 nick = privmsg[1:privmsg.find('!')]
 msg = privmsg[privmsg.find(':',1,len(privmsg))+1:len(privmsg)] 
 socket.send('PRIVMSG '+nick+' :'+msg) # sending to the socket


print 'Connecting...'
s = socket.socket()
s.connect(('irc.freenode.net',6667)) #connection to the irc server
s.send('NICK GlowPy\n')
s.send('USER PythonBot my.host.name humm : My Real Name\n')

while True:
 data = s.recv(1024) # reading from the socket
 print data
 if data.find('PRIVMSG') > 0: # if the string is a message
  reply(data,s)

A conversation with the bot:

<JustGlowing> hi there!
<GlowPy> hi there!
<JustGlowing> how are you?
<GlowPy> how are you?