Release/Master: Develop:

Python Eve Chat Monitoring

A library that focuses on monitoring EVE Online chat logs for messages and doing nothing else. It is meant to be focused and lightweight.

Python Version Support

Python 3.3.x Python 3.4.x

To Install

pip install py-eve-chat-mon

Quick-Start

import time
from py_eve_chat_mon.monitor import Monitor

def handler(chat, messages):
    print(chat)
    for msg in messages:
        print(msg)

if __name__ == "__main__":
    monitor = Monitor(['Alliance', 'Corp'], 
                      "C:\\Users\\YourName\\Documents\\EVE\\logs\\Chatlogs\\", 
                      handler)
    monitor.start()

    try:
        while True:
            time.sleep(1)
    except KeyboardInterrupt:
        monitor.stop()

    exit()

Detailed Start

Instantiate a Monitor

monitor = Monitor(chats, path, handler, poll_rate=2)

monitor = Monitor(['Alliance', 'Corp'], 
          "C:\\Users\\YourName\\Documents\\EVE\\logs\\Chatlogs\\", 
          handler, 
          5)

The monitor initializer takes in four arguments:

• chats - A list of case sensitive str chats that should be monitored
• path - A str path to the EVE chat log directory (The default is in the current user's documents folder)
• handler - A callable handler (i.e. a function or any other object that supports the call attribute) that accepts two arguments
  • chat - The str name of the chat that received a message
  • messages - An array of dict representing the chat messages
• poll_rate - An optional int that represents the seconds to wait between polling intervals on the chat logs. A higher values reduces the responsiveness but lightens the load on the local machines disk I/O

The messages array contains message dictionaries that have the following attributes:

• timestamp - A datetime object representing the game time when the message was received
• message - A str representing the message portion of the chat log (i.e. just the text the user typed)
• line - A str representing the entire chat log line (including un-parsed timestamp, username, etc.
• username - A str representing the username of the user who sent the message
• hash - An str that uniquely identified this string.

Start the monitor

monitor.start()

The monitor starts its own polling thread as a daemon (meaning it will stay running as long as the main thread is running). It can be stopped by calling monitor.stop() and restarted again by monitor.start().

UTF-16

It is worth noting that Eve's chat logs are in UTF-16. As such messages and text in there can cause issues if you are attempting to print it out to the console in Windows and there happens to be characters outside the consoles supported code points (Unicode charmap errors). You can get around this a little bit by setting the code page in the console to UTF-8 support (run chcp 65001), but it isn't perfect.

Polling?

Yes polling. The initial implementation attempted to use watchdog to receive file update events. However, besides the initial creation of the log files, no events are fired in a timely fashion.

Fun Ideas

I wrote this as a basis of another project. However I have thought of some other things that this could be used for:

• Watch for keywords (mentions) and provide toast/growl notifications
• Accumulate chat frequency statistics
• Stream chat to a central server (away-from-eve reading)

Unit tests

Unit tests are run on every commit via Travis-CI

Release/Master:

Develop: