Chat Stew

A pluggable parsing library for chat logs. It handles Adium out of the box.

Usage

require 'chat_stew'
# my_file can be anything that responds to #read. If it's a String, it's assumed
# that it's a filename.
chat = ChatStew.parse(my_file)
chat.each do |message|
  message.sender
  message.receiver
  message.message
  message.time # a DateTime
end

Writing your own parser

A parser is anything that conforms to this specification:

• responds to #can_parse?(file) and returns truish or falsish
• responds to #parse(file) and returns an Enumerable containing ChatStew::AdiumMessage instances

If two parsers are registered that can both parse a given file, the most-recently-registered parser will win. I.E. if you register FooParser and then register BarParser, and they can both parse a file called "foo.bar", then BarParser will be used to parse it since it was registered after FooParser.

class FooParser
  def can_parse?(file)
    file.path =~ /foo$/
  end

  def parse(file)
    # Just return an empty log
    []
  end
end

# Register it
foo_parser = FooParser.new
ChatStew.register(foo_parser)
# Will use foo_parser, so parse_result will be an empty array.
parse_result = ChatStew.parse("whatever.foo")

Author

Gabe Berke-Williams, 2011