ircg_pconnect() will try to establish a connection to an IRC server and return a connection resource handle for further use.
The only mandatory parameter is username, this will set your initial nickname on the server. server_ip and server_port are optional and default to 127.0.0.1 and 6667.
Note: For now parameter server_ip will not do any hostname lookups and will only accept IP addresses in numerical form. DNS lookups are expensive and should be done in the context of IRCG.
You can customize the output of IRC messages and events by selecting a format message set previously created with ircg_register_format_messages() by specifying the set's name in msg_format.
If you want to handle CTCP messages such as ACTION (/me), you need to define a mapping from CTCP type (e.g. ACTION) to a custom format string. Do this by passing an associative array as ctcp_messages. The keys of the array are the CTCP type and the respective value is the format message.
You can define "ident", "password", and "realname" tokens which are sent to the IRC server by setting these in an associative array. Pass that array as user_settings.
See also: ircg_disconnect(), ircg_is_conn_alive(), ircg_register_format_messages().