Create a Telegram Bot using Python

In this article, we are going to see how to create a telegram bot using Python.

In recent times Telegram has become one of the most used messaging and content sharing platforms, it has no file sharing limit like Whatsapp and it comes with some preinstalled bots one can use in any channels (groups in case of whatsapp) to control the behavior or filter the spam messages sent by users.

Requirements

• A Telegram Account: If you don't have the Telegram app installed just download it from the play store. After downloading create an account using your mobile number just like WhatsApp.
• .python-telegram-bot module: Here we will need a module called python-telegram-bot, This library provides a pure Python interface for the Telegram Bot API. It's compatible with Python versions 3.6.8+. In addition to the pure API implementation, this library features a number of high-level classes to make the development of bots easy and straightforward. These classes are contained in the "telegram.ext" submodule. For more information, you can check their official GitHub repo.

Installation of the module

We can install this module via pip and conda with the below command.

# installing via pip
pip install python-telegram-bot

# installing via conda
conda install -c conda-forge python-telegram-bot

Steps to create your first bot

Step 1: After opening an account on Telegram, in the search bar at the top search for "BotFather"

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Step 2: Click on the 'BotFather' (first result) and type /newbot

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Step 3: Give a unique name to your bot. After naming it, Botfather will ask for its username. Then also give a unique name BUT remember the username of your bot must end with the bot, like my_bot, hellobot etc.

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Step 4: After giving a unique name and if it gets accepted you will get a message something like this -

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Here the token value will be different for you, we will use this token in our python code to make changes in our bot and make it just like we want, and add some commands in it.

Stepwise implement

Step 1: Importing required libraries

Brief usage of the functions we are importing:

• Updater: This will contain the API key we got from BotFather to specify in which bot we are adding functionalities to using our python code.
• Update: This will invoke every time a bot receives an update i.e. message or command and will send the user a message.
• CallbackContext: We will not use its functionality directly in our code but when we will be adding the dispatcher it is required (and it will work internally)
• CommandHandler: This Handler class is used to handle any command sent by the user to the bot, a command always starts with "/" i.e "/start","/help" etc.
• MessageHandler: This Handler class is used to handle any normal message sent by the user to the bot,
• FIlters: This will filter normal text, commands, images, etc from a sent message.

Step 2: Define functions for operation

Start function: It will display the first conversation, you may name it something else but the message inside it will be sent to the user whenever they press 'start' at the very beginning.

Basically, in the start message, you should add something like "Hello Welcome to the Bot" etc.

Help function: It is basically in this function you should add any kind of help the user might need, i.e. All the commands your bot understands, The information related to the bot, etc)

Adding some more functionalities to the Bot.

Here we have added 4 functions one to open Gmail, one for youtube, one for LinkedIn, and the last one for GeeksforGeeks. These are not MANDATORY functions, you can add any kind of functions and their reply_text as you want, these are just for demonstration. Here the unknown_text function will send the message written inside it whenever it gets some unknown messages and the unknown function will Filter out all the unknown commands sent by the user and reply to the message written inside it.

Step 3: Adding the Handlers to handle our messages and commands

Here each line suggests that whenever a user writes a command i.e. the first parameter of the CommandHandler in reply the user gets the message written inside the function mentioned in the next parameter.

Step 4: Running the bot

Here whenever we start polling the bot will be active and it will look for any new message sent by any of the users and if it matches the command specified there it will reply accordingly.

Below is the full implementation:

Output: