From HaskellWiki

1 Roll your own IRC bot in Haskell, with monads!

This tutorial is designed as a practical guide to writing real world code in Haskell, and hopes to intuitively motivate and introduce some of the advanced features of Haskell to the novice programmer. Our goal is to write a concise, robust and elegant IRC bot in Haskell.

1.1 Getting started

You'll need a reasonably recent version of GHC or Hugs. Our first step is to get on the network. So let's start by importing the Network package, and the standard IO library and defining a server to connect to.

import Network
import System.IO
 
server = "irc.freenode.org"
port   = 6667
 
main = do
    h <- connectTo server (PortNumber (fromIntegral port))
    hSetBuffering h NoBuffering
    t <- hGetContents h
    print t

to a Haskell program. We first connect to the server, then set the buffering on the socket off. Once we've got a socket, we can then just read and print any data we receive.

Use whichever system you like:

Using runhaskell:

   $ runhaskell 1.hs
   "NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname...\r\nNOTICE AUTH :***
   Checking ident\r\nNOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname\r\n ...

Or we can just compile it to an executable with GHC:

   $ ghc --make 1.hs -o tutbot
   Chasing modules from: 1.hs
   Compiling Main             ( 1.hs, 1.o )
   Linking ...
   $ ./tutbot
   "NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname...\r\nNOTICE AUTH :***
   Checking ident\r\nNOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname\r\n ...

Or using GHCi:

   $ ghci 1.hs
   *Main> main
   "NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname...\r\nNOTICE AUTH :***
   Checking ident\r\nNOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname\r\n ...

Or in Hugs:

   $ runhugs 1.hs
   "NOTICE AUTH :*** Looking up your hostname...\r\nNOTICE AUTH :***
   Checking ident\r\nNOTICE AUTH :*** Found your hostname\r\n ...

Great! We're on the network.

1.2 Talking IRC

Now we're listening to the server, we better start sending some information back. Three details are important, the nick, the user name, and a channel to join. So let's send those.

import Network
import System.IO
import Text.Printf
 
server = "irc.freenode.org"
port   = 6667
chan   = "#tutbot-testing"
nick   = "tutbot"
 
main = do
    h <- connectTo server (PortNumber (fromIntegral port))
    hSetBuffering h NoBuffering
    write h "NICK" nick
    write h "USER" (nick++" 0 * :tutorial bot")
    write h "JOIN" chan
    listen h
 
write :: Handle -> String -> String -> IO ()
write h s t = do
    hPrintf h "%s %s\r\n" s t
    printf    "> %s %s\n" s t
 
listen h = forever $ do
    s <- hGetLine h
    putStrLn s
  where
    forever a = a >> forever a

Now, we've done quite a few things here. Firstly, we import

function. Let's look at that a bit more closely:

write :: Handle -> String -> String -> IO ()
write h s t = do
    hPrintf h "%s %s\r\n" s t
    printf    "> %s %s\n" s t

we'll use explicit types signatures from now on, as they're just good practice (though of course not required, as Haskell uses type inference to work out the types anyway).

socket), and then two strings representing an IRC protocol action, and

listen :: Handle -> IO ()
listen h = forever $ do
    s <- hGetLine h
    putStrLn s
  where
    forever a = a >> forever a

This function takes a Handle argument, and sits in an infinite loop reading lines of text from the network, and printing them. We take advantage of two powerful features, lazy evaluation and higher order