The Bot API is exposed via thetelegram.Bot class.The methods are thesnake_case equivalents of the methods described in the officialTelegram Bot API.The exactcamelCase method names as in the Telegram docs are also available for your convenience.For example,telegram.Bot.send_message is the same astelegram.Bot.sendMessage.All the classes of the Bot API can also be found in thetelegram module, e.g. theMessage class is available astelegram.Message.

To generate an Access Token, you have to talk toBotFather and follow a few simple steps (describedhere).

For full details see the official Telegram documentation atBots: An introduction for developers. You might also findthe official tutorial useful for getting to know the principles of working with Telegram API (although Java is used in examples there, you will find a link to equivalent Python code).

To get a feeling for the API and how to use it withpython-telegram-bot, please create a new Python file.

We first want to create an instance of thetelegram.Bot and check that the credentials are correct.Please paste the following code into your file.'TOKEN' should be replaced by the API token you received from@BotFather

importasyncioimporttelegramasyncdefmain():bot=telegram.Bot("TOKEN")asyncwithbot:print(awaitbot.get_me())if__name__=='__main__':asyncio.run(main())

Here we simply call the API methodgetMe.Theasync with bot: ensures that PTB can properly acquire and release resources.If you run the file you should get an output along the lines

$ python main.pyUser(first_name="Toledo's Palace Bot", is_bot=True, username="ToledosPalaceBot", ...)

So far so good.Now we can try and actually do something - let's send a message.

Because of that restriction, we'll have to first send a message to the bot.After we've done that, we can fetch the update by refactoring themain function in our file with

asyncdefmain():bot=telegram.Bot("TOKEN")asyncwithbot:updates= (awaitbot.get_updates())[0]print(updates)

The output should now look something like this (we abbreviated the output a bit):

$ python main.pyUpdate(message=Message(chat=Chat(first_name='John', id=1234567890, last_name='Doe', ...), from_user=User(first_name='John', id=1234567890, last_name='Doe', ...), text='Hi!', ...), update_id=219017225)

We copy the chat id, here1234567890.Note that you can access it also asupdates[0].message.from_user.id, becauseupdates[0] is an instance of theUpdate class.Now that we have the chat ID, we can send a message by again adjusting themain():

asyncdefmain():bot=telegram.Bot("TOKEN")asyncwithbot:awaitbot.send_message(text='Hi John!',chat_id=1234567890)

That's all very nice, but usually you want your bot to actually react to more complex user input. That is, you want to build a chat-bot.python-telegram-bot offers a powerful extension module calledtelegram.ext that takes a lot of work off your shoulders. You can find an introduction at theTutorial: Your first bot.