The newest version of my IRC bot, irbie is able to evaluate python code in channel and respond with the output.

It does this in only 33 lines of RUBY code.

#!/usr/bin/env ruby
require 'rubygems'
require 'mechanize'

class Sacrilege


  def initialize
    @code_stack = Array.new
    @agent = WWW::Mechanize.new
    @agent.user_agent_alias = 'Linux Mozilla'

    page = @agent.get('http://shell.appspot.com/')
    @form = page.forms[0]
  end

  def eval(msg)
    @code_stack.push(msg) if ( msg =~ /:$/ || !(@code_stack.empty?))
    if msg == nil && !(@code_stack.empty?)
      set(@code_stack.join("\n") + "\n")
      @code_stack.clear
      page = @agent.submit(@form)
    elsif @code_stack.empty?
      set(msg)
      page = @agent.submit(@form)
    end

    return page.body.split("\n").slice(0, 15) if page
    []
  end

  def set(val)
    @form.fields.find{|f| f.name == 'statement' }.value = val
  end


end

Of course, as with everything irbie does it’s smoke and mirrors. I just call it efficient use of webservices.

If you haven’t used mechanize before, it’s also a good advert for mechanize, which, by the way, has been ported to many other languages. Python included.