gen_tcp:send failing silently

[Samuel Tardieu]

> Things have evolved since last message.  I've managed to put the
> little bot online.

Great!

> Yeah, that's what I thought too, but the most elegant things with
> pattern matching is:

> case Data of [80,73,78,71] -> ...

> and that gets ugly when the string is longer.  I'm probably missing
> something about pattern-matching.

Implement a full fledged parser for the IRC protocol then. Here is
mine:

%%--------------------------------------------------------------------
%% Function: parse/1
%% Description: Return a list of arguments in an IRC command. The
%%              answer is a tuple {Sender, Command} where Sender can
%%              be false if no server has been detected.
%%--------------------------------------------------------------------

parse ([$: | Line]) ->
    [Sender | Rest] = string:tokens (Line, " "),
    {false, Command} = parse (join (Rest, " ")),
    {Sender, Command};

parse (Line) ->
    [NoNewLine | NewLine] = string:tokens (Line, "\r\n"),
    [Before | Rest] = string:tokens (NoNewLine, ":"),
    End = case join (Rest, " ") of
	      [] -> [];
	      X  -> [X]
	  end,
    {false, string:tokens (Before, " ") ++ End}.

join ([], _) -> "";
join ([X], _) -> X;
join ([X | Xs], C) -> X ++ C ++ join (Xs, C).

For example, if you feed parse with "PING :1234567", it will return
{false, ["PING", "1234567"]}.

> I'm slightly bothered by this behavior.  An error like a mistyped
> function like "substring" should for raise some kind of warning on
> the console.  Perhaps I'm too used to stricter language where such
> an error is treated as a catastrophe: "Compiler error: OMG! THAT
> FUNCTION DOESN'T EXIST! RUN FOR YOUR LIFE"...

> Any advices here?  I'm a simple comp. sci. student that usually
> prefers Java for homeworks.

You should use Erlang cross-referencer to look for undefined external
functions (try "erl -man xref").

  Sam
-- 
Samuel Tardieu -- sam@REDACTED -- http://www.rfc1149.net/sam