Best structuring for IRC message decoding (Python)

Question

I am writing a simple IRC chatbot in Python and, in an effort to get more into OOP, made a basic "connection" class that manages all the backing-and-forthing involved. But IRC protocol is rather annoying to work with, so I wrote a function that takes the raw message from the server and translates it into a form that's much easier to work with. (It separates out the user/channel the message came from, the message it contained, etc.)

In my first iteration of this function, I used a tuple to return this information, but this was extremely difficult to work with as I had to remember which item in the tuple corresponded with what information. Then I changed it to return a dictionary, with the indices being "channel," "user," and "msg." (Not all are used for every message/event, of course.) But as I'm looking back at my code written for that system, it too seems a bit unwieldy. So what's the best* way to go about doing this? Was my string-indexed list a good way to go? Or should I continue with the tuples, but unpack it into separate variables? Thanks in advance.

• I'm going for readability, maintainability, and Pythonicness (if that's a word)

Answer 1

Consider object oriented programming.

If you have procedures that need to act on this data, a class groups them together nicely. Your function, that takes the raw messages, could be used to construct these objects.

For maintainability try a tell, don't ask approach.

You should endeavor to tell objects what you want them to do; do not ask them questions about their state, make a decision, and then tell them what to do.

You could tell such an object: display to your channel, open a private msg window with this user, raise any of these events called for once they parse this msg.

This gets you away from procedural programming. It's a bit different but it scales really well.