PHP or JavaScript - interpreting a chat

[richwillars]

Evening all!

I've hit a brick wall with this problem... can't understand why it's so hard either! I'm hoping that some of you guys will have some ideas...

I'm trying to write a script in either JavaScript or PHP (doesn't matter which) that will allow you to copy and paste a conversation either from an email or an instant messaging program such as msn or adium. The idea is the script would read the conversation and split it up into it's messages, as well as extract the sender name and the time...

So for example if I had this conversation:

gavin holt
20:50
this is gavin's 1st message

rich
20:50
this is rich's 1st message

gavin holt
20:54
this is gavin's 2nd message

54:44
this is gavin's 3rd message

54:47
this is gavin's 4th message

rich
20:55
this is rich's 2nd message

56:46
this is rich's 3rd message

gavin holt
20:57
this is gavin's 5th message

It would be interpreted by the script to this..

Gavin - 20:50 - this is gavin's 1st message
Rich - 20:50 - this is rich's 1st message
Gavin - 20:54 - this is gavin's 2nd message
Gavin - 20:54 - this is gavin's 3rd message
Gavin - 20:54 - this is gavin's 4th message
Rich - 20:55 - this is rich's 2nd message
Rich - 20:56 - this is rich's 3rd message
Gavin - 20:57 - this is gavin's 5th message

Now obviously emails and IM conversations aren't in the same format, so it'd have to be able to cope with a variable input.. so you could specify that the start of each message is in the following format:

rich
%TIME%
...

or

Richard @ %DATETIME%
...

or

On %DATETIME% Richard wrote:
...

If anyone has any ideas about how to go about this or has seen this done before I'd really appreciate the input.

Thanks in advance!

[-T-]

You will have to create a filter for each format. Then test the content for which filter to use.

This links pretty close to data migration, which is a pain.

[richwillars]

Very true.

In my eyes there's 2 problems here..

• The different filters.. I need a way of converting 'Richard @ %DATETIME%' into a regular expression that says 'Richard @ anyword'.
• The actual process for running the regular expressions against the conversation and extracting the messages

[AnthonySterling]

I would create 2 elements to the parsing.

The first would determine which filter to apply, MSN, Yahoo etc.. and then the second would parse the actual data.

This would be far more extensible.

<?php
class MessageParserFactory
{
    private static $aPatterns = array(
        'YahooMessageParser'    =>    '~someRegExp~',
        'MSNMessageParser'        =>    '~anotherRegExp~'
    );
    
    public static function LoadParser($sMessage)
    {
        foreach (self::$aPatterns as $sParser => $sRegExp)
        {
            if(1 === preg_match($sRegExp, $sMessage))
            {
                return new $sParser($sMessage);
            }
        }
        return new NullMessageParser();
    }
}

$oParser = MessageParserFactory::LoadParser('your message to parse');
?>

[richwillars]

Another excellent concept - I'll definitely make use of that script.. I didn't think of writing different classes for each format of conversation. It makes things a lot simpler doing it that way!

[AnthonySterling]

Indeed, it would make things a lot cleaner to do it this way. Of course it would need more components, but the benefits greatly out way this.

<?php
# Load the parser
$oParser = MessageParserFactory::LoadParser($sMessage);

# Display 3rd message details
printf('At %s, %s said %s',
    $oParser->getMessage(3)->getTime(),
    $oParser->getMessage(3)->getName(),
    $oParser->getMessage(3)->getMessage()
);

# Display 1st message details
printf('At %s, %s said %s',
    $oParser->getMessage(1)->getTime(),
    $oParser->getMessage(1)->getName(),
    $oParser->getMessage(1)->getMessage()
);

#Create a little conversation of sorts
printf('At %s, %s said %s to %s, who replied %s',
    $oParser->getMessage(1)->getTime(),
    $oParser->getMessage(1)->getName(),
    $oParser->getMessage(1)->getMessage(),
    $oParser->getMessage(2)->getName(),
    $oParser->getMessage(2)->getMessage()
);

#Save 1st message to database
$sSQL = sprintf("INSERT INTO messages (time, name, message)VALUES('%s', '%s', '%s')",
    mysql_real_escape_string($oParser->getMessage(1)->getTime()),
    mysql_real_escape_string($oParser->getMessage(1)->getName()),
    mysql_real_escape_string($oParser->getMessage(1)->getMessage())
);
?>