Sending messages with Telegram - APIs or CLI?

Question

I would like to be able to send a message to a group chat in Telegram. I want to run a python script (which makes some operations that already works) and then, if some parameters have some values the script should send a message to a group chat through Telegram. I am using Ubuntu, and Python 2.7

I think, if I am not wrong, that I have two ways to do that:

• Way One: make the Python script connect to the Telegram APIs directly and send the message (https://core.telegram.org/api).

• Way Two: make the Python script call the Telegram's CLI (https://github.com/vysheng/tg), pass some values to this and then the message is sent by the Telegram's CLI.

I think that the first way is longer, so a good idea might be using the Way Two.

In this case I really don't know how to proceed. I don't know lots about scripts in linux, but I tried to do this:

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/username/tg
echo "msg user#******** messagehere" | ./telegram
sleep 10
echo "quit" | ./telegram

this works at a half: it sends the message correctly, but then the process remains open. And second problem, I have no clue on how to call that from python and how to pass some value to this script. The value that I would like to pass to the script is the "messagehere" var: this would be a 100/200 characters message, defined from inside the python script.

Does anyone has any clues on that? Thanks for replies, I hope this might be useful for someone else.

Answer 1

Telegram recently released their new Bot API which makes sending/receiving messages trivial. I suggest you also take a look at that and see if it fits your needs, it beats wrapping the client library or integrating with their MTProto API.

import urllib
import urllib2

# Generate a bot ID here: https://core.telegram.org/bots#botfather
bot_id = "{YOUR_BOT_ID}"

# Request latest messages
result = urllib2.urlopen("https://api.telegram.org/bot" + bot_id + "/getUpdates").read()
print result

# Send a message to a chat room (chat room ID retrieved from getUpdates)
result = urllib2.urlopen("https://api.telegram.org/bot" + bot_id + "/sendMessage", urllib.urlencode({ "chat_id": 0, "text": 'my message' })).read()
print result

Unfortunately I haven't seen any Python libraries you can interact directly with, but here is a NodeJS equivalent I worked on for reference.