I’m using the python-telegram-bot library to write a bot in Python that sends URLs into a channel where the bot is administrator.
Now, I would like to have the bot reading, let’s say, the last 5 messages (I don’t really care about the number as I just need to read the message on the chat) and store them into a list in the code for further elaborations.
I already have my bot working with:
bot = telegram.Bot(token='mytoken')
bot.sendMessage(chat_id='@mychatid', text=entry.link)
But I can’t find a bot.getLastMessage
or bot.getMessage
kind of class into the python-telegram-bot library.
In case there’s already no written class that does that, how can I implement it via the Telegram API as I’m a bit of a beginner when it comes to API implementation?
Thanks.
2
Answers
That’s not possible in Bots unfortunately.
Here you can find all available methods (that
python-telegram-bot
invokes behind the scenes) and there’s no such method available to fetch messages on demand.The closest you can get through the api is
getChat
(which would return thepinned_message
in that chat).What you can do in this case is, store the messages the bot sends as well as the message updates the bot receives (by setting up a handler) in some storage (database) and fetch from there later on.
Have you tried the other type of Telegram API, Telegram [client] API and TDLib?
Using telethon library makes it easy to read channels history (see telethon docs).
For this, we need an
api_id
and anapi_hash
.To get these parameters, we need to log in to our Telegram core
and go to the API development tools area.
There is a simple form that needs to be filled out, after which, we can receive our
api_id
andapi_hash
. See Telegram’s help documentation about how to get your API credentials.Here is an example code that gets the last 5 messages of targetChannelId:
The first time you run this code it asks your phone number or bot token. Enter your phone number in the format
+9912345...
where99
is your country code and the rest is your phone number.It then may send a login code to your Telegram app; enter it in the console.
Note: Bots cannot see channel history messages (at least in telethon) but users (phone numbers) can. Bots can only listen for channel updates only if they are one of its administrators.
The
client.iter_messages()
accepts other parameters likemin_id
which can be used so we get messages only after a specific message (for example, we can save the last message id that we have processed and next time pass that id asmin_id
so only messages after that message are returned).