How to use python-telegram-bot to send messages to a telegram channel

Question

I created a telegram bot and added it to my telegram channel. Now, I want to use it to send messages to my channel, when something is happening in my python program. For example, I have a python program that checks the weather every 15 secs, and when there's a change in the weather, I want my bot to send the new weather information to my telegram channel.

So my question is, how can I do it? I'm stuck because python-telegram-bot requires a message from the user to get triggered, or a scheduled orders, while I can't schedule it because I don't know when the weather will change.

Waneta

You can get the weather, then store it in another temp variable. Then You can use a if condition, to check if weather info in that temp variable is same or not. If it isn't, send the message via bot, and update the temp variable. You can use a while True loop, with time.sleep(interval) to run the check weather function after set interval – Tram

yes, that's what I wanted to do, but the problem is with python-telegram-bot library. It doesn't allow you to send a message without a user request or schedule a message in a known time – Waneta

Answer 1

The easiest method to do this is to use the request method. Telegram provides a cool API to send messages with your bot, you need to do that with a link for example :

https://api.telegram.org/bot<yourbottoken>/sendMessage?chat_id=<yourchatid>&text=Hello World!

What this does is that it will send the Hello World message to a certain chat id. If you don't know how to get a chat id, you need to DM your bot and you can use this link :

https://api.telegram.org/bot<yourbottoken>/getUpdates

In the page, there will be quite a lot of JSON data, you need to use Control + F and search for your telegram username without the @ and search for the chat id

If you want to do this in a python code, you need to use the requests module.

import requests
requests.post('https://api.telegram.org/bot<yourbottoken>/sendMessage?chat_id=<yourchatid>&text=Hello World!')

Garwood

Thanks! I didn't know about telegram API. that makes my life much easier. where can I find all the API request method links? And one more thing, how can I send the message in a formatted string and let's say with \n in python? Thanks! – Waneta

Hey! you can read more about it in Telegram Bot API Manual You can use markdown formatting, it's Here! – Garwood

It didn't work for me – Parkman

@Parkman what did not work? – Garwood

@Garwood using requests.post didn't work. – Parkman

@Parkman did it give any error? What statuscode? – Garwood

no it didn't give any error – Parkman

@Parkman did it just not send to the target? – Garwood

Thanks a lot the problem was from ISP. – Parkman