Editing WoW:Parsing event messages (section)

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Event messages are things like combat log messages, loot messages, online/offline notifications, and so on.

If you are writing an AddOn that wants to take some sort of action when a certain event happens (for example, tracking your honor from PvP kills), you need to find the correct event and register to listen for that event.  Some events provide you the information about that event in compact easy-to-use arguments.  For example, the REPLACE_ENCHANT event has two arguments, arg1 (the name of the enchant) and arg2 (the name of the item).  Other events don't provide you the arguments in such an easy-to-use form.  For example, the CHAT_MSG_COMBAT_HONOR_GAIN event has one big long argument, arg1, that looks something like "Joe dies, honorable kill Rank: Commander (Estimated Honor Points: 10)".  What you really want to know, though, is
# who died
# what their rank was, and
# how many estimated honor points it was worth.
In order to get this information, you need to parse the big long string.