Question 58303 in Telegram API Question posted in
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telegram use schedule message – Telegram API

I want to schedule a telegram bot message to be sent at a specific unixtime.

As from telegrams official api (https://core.telegram.org/api/scheduled-messages) that should be possible by setting the schedule_date flag.

To schedule a message, simply provide a future unixtime in the schedule_date flag of messages.sendMessage or messages.sendMedia.

However I was not able to set that flag. To be more precisely, I do not even know how to set a flag, or if I am using the correct api.

What I have tried is to use the api directly via the browser (could use curl as well) like so: https://api.telegram.org/botBOT:TOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=ID&text=Test&schedule_date=1653503351

I also did not find any way to access this flag via https://pypi.org/project/pyTelegramBotAPI/#description https://telepot.readthedocs.io/en/latest/#send-a-message, nor https://github.com/nickoala/telepot.

I want to implement this feature in a python environment, but any working suggestion would be much appreciated.

EDIT:
I decided to save the intention to send a telegram bot message at a certain unixtime in a database. I then create an infinite loop that checks if there are any unsent messages before the current timestamp. If the loop detects such a message it sends the message and sets a flag, that that message has been sent.

And as promised, here is a fully dockerized example of that behaviour in action: https://github.com/Sokrates1989/nameTheCountDown-lightweight

It creates a bot that you can pass a name and the duration. Once the duration has passed it sends a message with the passed name. Basically a simple countdown that you can give several names, that run simltaniously. As it is a telegram chat, you can modify the way you are informed about the end of a countdown by modifying the notificaiton of that chat.

And here is the Bot in action: http://t.me/NameTheCountdownBot

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3

Answers


  1. 0

    We can’t do this by bot API itself, and there’s no schedule_date parameter in sendMessage method:
    https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#sendmessage
    And what you’ve read is for Telegram clients, not bot API consumers.

    If you don’t really need unixtime, you can simply create a table for scheduled messages with a text, chat_id and a publish_time column (like 22:15), and run a command every minute to look if there’s a message for current time to send. Then send the message and delete the record.

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  2. 0

    Note that the python-telegram-bot library has a built-in solution for scheduling tasks: The JobQueue. This feature is based on the APScheduler library, which you can ofc also use without python-telegram-bot.

    Disclaimer: I’m currently the maintainer of python-telegram-bot.

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