Important
While you have access to this, you should always use the friendly methods listed on :ref:`client-ref` unless you have a better reason not to, like a method not existing or you wanting more control.
The :ref:`telethon-client` doesn't offer a method for every single request the Telegram API supports. However, it's very simple to call or invoke any request. Whenever you need something, don't forget to check the documentation and look for the method you need. There you can go through a sorted list of everything you can do.
Note
The reason to keep both https://tl.telethon.dev and this
documentation alive is that the former allows instant search results
as you type, and a "Copy import" button. If you like namespaces, you
can also do from telethon.tl import types, functions
. Both work.
Important
All the examples in this documentation assume that you have
from telethon import sync
or import telethon.sync
for the
sake of simplicity and that you understand what it does (see
:ref:`compatibility-and-convenience` for more). Simply add
either line at the beginning of your project and it will work.
You should also refer to the documentation to see what the objects (constructors) Telegram returns look like. Every constructor inherits from a common type, and that's the reason for this distinction.
Say client.send_message() <telethon.client.messages.MessageMethods.send_message> didn't exist, we could use the search to look for "message". There we would find :tl:`SendMessageRequest`, which we can work with.
Every request is a Python class, and has the parameters needed for you
to invoke it. You can also call help(request)
for information on
what input parameters it takes. Remember to "Copy import to the
clipboard", or your script won't be aware of this class! Now we have:
from telethon.tl.functions.messages import SendMessageRequest
If you're going to use a lot of these, you may do:
from telethon.tl import types, functions
# We now have access to 'functions.messages.SendMessageRequest'
We see that this request must take at least two parameters, a peer
of type :tl:`InputPeer`, and a message
which is just a Python
string.
How can we retrieve this :tl:`InputPeer`? We have two options. We manually construct one, for instance:
from telethon.tl.types import InputPeerUser
peer = InputPeerUser(user_id, user_hash)
Or we call client.get_input_entity() <telethon.client.users.UserMethods.get_input_entity>:
import telethon
async def main():
peer = await client.get_input_entity('someone')
client.loop.run_until_complete(main())
Note
Remember that await
must occur inside an async def
.
Every full API example assumes you already know and do this.
When you're going to invoke an API method, most require you to pass an :tl:`InputUser`, :tl:`InputChat`, or so on, this is why using client.get_input_entity() <telethon.client.users.UserMethods.get_input_entity> is more straightforward (and often immediate, if you've seen the user before, know their ID, etc.). If you also need to have information about the whole user, use client.get_entity() <telethon.client.users.UserMethods.get_entity> instead:
entity = await client.get_entity('someone')
In the later case, when you use the entity, the library will cast it to its "input" version for you. If you already have the complete user and want to cache its input version so the library doesn't have to do this every time its used, simply call telethon.utils.get_input_peer:
from telethon import utils
peer = utils.get_input_peer(entity)
Note
Since v0.16.2
this is further simplified. The Request
itself
will call client.get_input_entity
<telethon.client.users.UserMethods.get_input_entity> for you when
required, but it's good to remember what's happening.
After this small parenthesis about client.get_entity <telethon.client.users.UserMethods.get_entity> versus client.get_input_entity() <telethon.client.users.UserMethods.get_input_entity>, we have everything we need. To invoke our request we do:
result = await client(SendMessageRequest(peer, 'Hello there!'))
Message sent! Of course, this is only an example. There are over 250 methods available as of layer 80, and you can use every single of them as you wish. Remember to use the right types! To sum up:
result = await client(SendMessageRequest(
await client.get_input_entity('username'), 'Hello there!'
))
This can further be simplified to:
result = await client(SendMessageRequest('username', 'Hello there!'))
# Or even
result = await client(SendMessageRequest(PeerChannel(id), 'Hello there!'))
Note
Note that some requests have a "hash" parameter. This is not
your api_hash
! It likely isn't your self-user .access_hash
either.
It's a special hash used by Telegram to only send a difference of new data that you don't already have with that request, so you can leave it to 0, and it should work (which means no hash is known yet).
For those requests having a "limit" parameter, you can often set it to zero to signify "return default amount". This won't work for all of them though, for instance, in "messages.search" it will actually return 0 items.
The library will automatically merge outgoing requests into a single container. Telegram's API supports sending multiple requests in a single container, which is faster because it has less overhead and the server can run them without waiting for others. You can also force using a container manually:
async def main():
# Letting the library do it behind the scenes
await asyncio.wait([
client.send_message('me', 'Hello'),
client.send_message('me', ','),
client.send_message('me', 'World'),
client.send_message('me', '.')
])
# Manually invoking many requests at once
await client([
SendMessageRequest('me', 'Hello'),
SendMessageRequest('me', ', '),
SendMessageRequest('me', 'World'),
SendMessageRequest('me', '.')
])
Note that you cannot guarantee the order in which they are run. Try running the above code more than one time. You will see the order in which the messages arrive is different.
If you use the raw API (the first option), you can use ordered
to tell the server that it should run the requests sequentially.
This will still be faster than going one by one, since the server
knows all requests directly:
await client([
SendMessageRequest('me', 'Hello'),
SendMessageRequest('me', ', '),
SendMessageRequest('me', 'World'),
SendMessageRequest('me', '.')
], ordered=True)
If any of the requests fails with a Telegram error (not connection
errors or any other unexpected events), the library will raise
telethon.errors.common.MultiError. You can except
this
and still access the successful results:
from telethon.errors import MultiError
try:
await client([
SendMessageRequest('me', 'Hello'),
SendMessageRequest('me', ''),
SendMessageRequest('me', 'World')
], ordered=True)
except MultiError as e:
# The first and third requests worked.
first = e.results[0]
third = e.results[2]
# The second request failed.
second = e.exceptions[1]