WoW API: SendAddonMessage

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Sends a message to hidden AddOn channels. Introduced in Patch 1.12.

SendAddonMessage("prefix", "text", "type", "target")

Parameters

prefix: String - Message prefix, can be used as your addon identifier.
text: String - Text to send.
type: String - AddOn channel to send to. Valid types are "PARTY", "RAID", "GUILD", "BATTLEGROUND". As of 2.1, "WHISPER" was also added.
target: String - Used only for "WHISPER" communication - the player to whisper to.

SendAddonMessage( "CTRA", "User Data: XYZ", "RAID" );

Calling this function results in the event CHAT_MSG_ADDON being invoked on all clients in the PARTY, RAID, BATTLEGROUND or GUILD channels.
Messages sent to "RAID" while in a party will get delivered to "PARTY"; messages sent to "RAID" or "PARTY" while not in a group will not be delivered. To send to your battleground group, "BATTLEGROUND" must be used.
The message will not be affected by the player's level of drunkenness.
The tab character ("\t") is used as a delimiter between the prefix and the message text -- because of this, \t can not be used as part of prefix. The combined length of message and prefix can be at most 254 characters (255th is the tab character used to delimit the two), length above 254 will disconnect you.
The "WHISPER" mode was added with patch 2.1, as servers will begin to rate throttle regular whispers to alleviate spam problems.