telnetlib - confused

[Eddie Corns]

Rich Daley <daley at ignore-this.cs.man.ac.uk> writes:


>I am pretty new to python, so please treat me like a newbie :)

>I am very keen on telnet-based chatrooms (eg <telnet:surfers.org:4242>)
>and I am interested in writing a python client to talk in these.

>My problem is that I've been trying to work out how to do something
>straightforward in telnetlib and haven't succeeded yet.

>As you can imagine, I would like an interactive session with this
>chatroom, but I don't want to use Telnet.interactive() because I don't want the
>user to be able to enter text directly, more just have it entered by
>events from the code (ie Telnet.write() events).

>However, I would like all the text that appears in the session, whether
>EOF has been reached or not to be output (in the console for now).

>Could anyone help me with this, or at least make sense of what I'm saying,
>because when I look back at it I barely understand it myself.

I *think* from what you're saying you want to use something like mt_interact.
I only noticed this myself when reviewing the docs.  Here's a quick and crude
bit of demo code that replaces mt_interact with your own version:

import telnetlib as tl
import sys

rude_words = ['perl', 'microsoft']

class myTelnet (tl.Telnet):
    def my_interact (self):
        """Multithreaded version of interact()."""
        import thread
        thread.start_new_thread(self.listener, ())
        while 1:
            line = sys.stdin.readline()
            if not line:
                break
            for rw in rude_words:
                if line.find (rw) != -1:
                    print "Tsk tsk you know you can't say things like that in public"
                    break
            else:
                self.write(line)

con = myTelnet (sys.argv[1])

con.my_interact()

This was cribbed directly from the source.  Obviously what you could do here
is replace the while loop with your own checking.

Eddie