Code snippets

This page can be read on its own to find the code snippet you need right now.

It is also a follow-up to the page Introduction to the API. If you come from there, you can leave your command line open and just try out a few of these snippets.

• Pure API
  • Fetch updates
  • Fetch images sent to your Bot
  • Reply to messages
• General code snippets
  • Post a text message
  • Reply to a message
  • Post a text message with Markdown formatting
  • Post a text message with HTML formatting
  • Post an image file from disk
  • Post a voice file from disk
  • Post a file from an URL
  • Send a chat action
  • [Custom Keyboards:](#-custom-keyboards--https---coretelegramorg-bots-keyboards--)
  • Requesting location and contact from user
  • Hide a custom keyboard
  • Download a file
  • Message entities
• Advanced snippets
  • Restrict access to a handler (decorator)
    • Usage
  • Cached Telegram group administrator check
  • Build a menu with Buttons
    • Usage
  • Simple way of restarting the bot
• What to read next?

Table of contents generated with markdown-toc

Pure API

Fetch updates

To fetch messages sent to your Bot, you can use the getUpdates API method.

Note: You don't have to use getUpdates if you are writing your bot with the telegram.ext submodule, since telegram.ext.Updater takes care of fetching all updates for you. Read more about that here.

>>> updates = bot.getUpdates()
>>> print([u.message.text for u in updates])

Fetch images sent to your Bot

>>> updates = bot.getUpdates()
>>> print([u.message.photo for u in updates if u.message.photo])

Reply to messages

You'll always need the chat_id

>>> chat_id = bot.getUpdates()[-1].message.chat_id

General code snippets

These snippets usually apply to both ways of fetching updates. If you're using telegram.ext, you can get the chat_id in your handler callback with update.message.chat_id.

Note: In general, you can send messages to users by passing their user id as the chat_id. If the bot has a chat with the user, it will send the message to that chat.

Post a text message

>>> bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chat_id, text="I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that.")

Reply to a message

This is a shortcut to bot.sendMessage with same defaults. Read more about it in the docs.

>>> update.message.reply_text("I'm sorry Dave I'm afraid I can't do that.")

Note: There are equivalents of this method for replying with photos, audio etc., and similar shortcuts exist throughout the library. Related PRs: #362, #420, #423

Post a text message with Markdown formatting

>>> bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chat_id, 
...                 text="*bold* _italic_ `fixed width font` [link](http://google.com).", 
...                 parse_mode=telegram.ParseMode.MARKDOWN)

Post a text message with HTML formatting

>>> bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chat_id, 
...                 text='<b>bold</b> <i>italic</i> <a href="http://google.com">link</a>.', 
...                 parse_mode=telegram.ParseMode.HTML)

Post an image file from disk

>>> bot.sendPhoto(chat_id=chat_id, photo=open('tests/test.png', 'rb'))

Post a voice file from disk

>>> bot.sendVoice(chat_id=chat_id, voice=open('tests/telegram.ogg', 'rb'))

Post a file from an URL

>>> bot.sendPhoto(chat_id=chat_id, photo='https://telegram.org/img/t_logo.png')

Send a chat action

Use this to tell the user that something is happening on the bot's side:

>>> bot.sendChatAction(chat_id=chat_id, action=telegram.ChatAction.TYPING)

Custom Keyboards:

>>> custom_keyboard = [['top-left', 'top-right'], 
...                    ['bottom-left', 'bottom-right']]
>>> reply_markup = telegram.ReplyKeyboardMarkup(custom_keyboard)
>>> bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chat_id, 
...                 text="Custom Keyboard Test", 
...                 reply_markup=reply_markup)

See also: Build a menu with Buttons

Requesting location and contact from user

>>> location_keyboard = telegram.KeyboardButton(text="send_location", request_location=True)
>>> contact_keyboard = telegram.KeyboardButton(text="send_contact", request_contact=True)
>>> custom_keyboard = [[ location_keyboard, contact_keyboard ]]
>>> reply_markup = telegram.ReplyKeyboardMarkup(custom_keyboard)
>>> bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chat_id, 
...                 text="Would you mind sharing your location and contact with me?", 
...                 reply_markup=reply_markup)

Hide a custom keyboard

>>> reply_markup = telegram.ReplyKeyboardHide()
>>> bot.sendMessage(chat_id=chat_id, text="I'm back.", reply_markup=reply_markup)

Download a file

>>> file_id = message.voice.file_id
>>> newFile = bot.getFile(file_id)
>>> newFile.download('voice.ogg')

Note: For downloading photos, keep in mind that update.message.photo is an array of different photo sizes. Use update.message.photo[-1] to get the biggest size.

Message entities

To use MessageEntity, extract the entities from a Message object using get_entities.

Note: This method should always be used instead of the entities attribute, since it calculates the correct substring from the message text based on UTF-16 codepoints - that is, it extracts the correct string even on when working with weird characters such as Emojis.

>>> entities = message.get_entities()

There are many more API methods. To read the full API documentation, visit the Telegram API documentation or the library documentation of telegram.Bot

Advanced snippets

Restrict access to a handler (decorator)

This decorator allows you to restrict the access of a handler to only the user_ids specified in LIST_OF_ADMINS.

from functools import wraps

LIST_OF_ADMINS = [12345678, 87654321]

def restricted(func):
    @wraps(func)
    def wrapped(bot, update, *args, **kwargs):
        # extract user_id from arbitrary update
        try:
            user_id = update.message.from_user.id
        except (NameError, AttributeError):
            try:
                user_id = update.inline_query.from_user.id
            except (NameError, AttributeError):
                try:
                    user_id = update.chosen_inline_result.from_user.id
                except (NameError, AttributeError):
                    try:
                        user_id = update.callback_query.from_user.id
                    except (NameError, AttributeError):
                        print("No user_id available in update.")
                        return
        if user_id not in LIST_OF_ADMINS:
            print("Unauthorized access denied for {}.".format(chat_id))
            return
        return func(bot, update, *args, **kwargs)
    return wrapped

Usage

Add a @restricted decorator on top of your handler declaration:

@restricted
def my_handler(bot, update):
    pass  # only accessible if `user_id` is in `LIST_OF_ADMINS`.

Cached Telegram group administrator check

If you want to limit certain bot functions to group administrators, you have to test if a user is an administrator in the group in question. This however requires an extra API request, which is why it can make sense to cache this information for a certain time, especially if your bot is very busy.

This snippet requires this timeout-based cache decorator. (gist mirror)

Save the decorator to a new file named mwt.py and add this line to your imports:

from mwt import MWT

Then, add the following decorated function to your script. You can change the timeout as required.

@MWT(timeout=60*60)
def get_admin_ids(bot, chat_id):
    """Returns a list of admin IDs for a given chat. Results are cached for 1 hour."""
    return [admin.user.id for admin in bot.getChatAdministrators(chat_id)]

You can then use the function like this:

if update.message.from_user.id in get_admin_ids(bot, update.message.chat_id):
    # admin only

Note: Private chats are not covered by this snippet. Make sure you handle them.

Build a menu with Buttons

Often times you will find yourself in need for a menu with dynamic content. Use the following build_menu method to create a button layout with n_cols columns out of a list of buttons.

def build_menu(buttons: List,
               n_cols: int,
               header_buttons: List = None,
               footer_buttons: List = None):
    menu = list()
    for i in range(0, len(buttons)):
        item = buttons[i]
        if i % n_cols == 0:
            menu.append([item])
        else:
            menu[int(i / n_cols)].append(item)
    if header_buttons:
        menu.insert(0, header_buttons)
    if footer_buttons:
        menu.append(footer_buttons)
    return menu

You can use the header_buttons and footer_buttons lists to put buttons in the first or last row respectively.

Usage

button_list = [
    InlineKeyboardButton("col 1", ...),
    InlineKeyboardButton("col 2", ...),
    InlineKeyboardButton("row 2", ...)
]
reply_markup = InlineKeyboardMarkup(util.build_menu(button_list, n_cols=2))
bot.send_message(..., "A two-column menu", reply_markup=reply_markup)

This is especially useful if put inside a helper method like get_data_buttons to work on dynamic data and updating the menu according to user input.

Replace the ... in above snippet by an appropriate argument, as indicated in the InlineKeyboardButton documentation. If you want to use KeyboardButtons, use ReplyKeyboardMarkup instead of InlineKeyboardMarkup.

Simple way of restarting the bot

The following handler allows you to easily restart the bot. It goes without saying that you should protect this method from access by unauthorized users.

import os
import time
import sys

def restart(bot, update):
    bot.sendMessage(update.message.chat_id, "Bot is restarting...")
    time.sleep(0.2)
    os.execl(sys.executable, sys.executable, *sys.argv)

You can trigger this handler with the /r-command within Telegram, once you have added it to the dispatcher: dispatcher.add_handler(CommandHandler('r', restart))

What to read next?

If you haven't read the tutorial "Extensions – Your first Bot" yet, you might want to do it now.