Frequently Asked Questions

Frequently Asked Questions

Note: You may also want to check the official Telegram Bot FAQ.

• What messages can my Bot see?
• What about messages from other Bots?
• Can my bot delete messages from the user in a private chat?
• How can I get a list of all chats/users/channels my bot is interacting with?
• Does my bot get an update, when someone joins my channel?
• My bot doesn't receive messages from groups. Why?
• Can you add [feature] to PTB? Can I do [thing] with my bot?
• I'm using ConversationHandler and want one handler to be run multiple times. How do I do that?
• I want to handle updates from an external service in addition to the Telegram updates. How do I do that?
• Why am I getting ImportError: cannot import name 'XY' from 'telegram'?
• What do the per_* settings in ConversationHandler do?
• How can I disable the per_* settings warnings?
• Can I check, if a ConversationHandler is currently active for a user?
• How can I list all messages of a particular chat or search through them based on a search query?
• How can I disable logging for the APScheduler module?
• How do I enforce users joining a specific channel before using my bot?
• Why am I getting an error The following arguments have not been supplied?
• How can I check the version of PTB I am using?
• Is there a limit on the number of buttons in an inline keyboard?
• How do I access info about the message my bot sent?
• How do I send a message to all users of the bot?

What messages can my Bot see?

From the official Telegram Bot FAQ:

All bots, regardless of settings, will receive:

• All service messages.
• All messages from private chats with users.
• All messages from channels where they are a member.

Bot admins and bots with privacy mode disabled will receive all messages except messages sent by other bots.

Bots with privacy mode enabled will receive:

• Commands explicitly meant for them (e.g., /command@this_bot).
• General commands from users (e.g. /start) if the bot was the last bot to send a message to the group.
• Messages sent via this bot.
• Replies to any messages implicitly or explicitly meant for this bot.

Note that each particular message can only be available to one privacy-enabled bot at a time, i.e., a reply to bot A containing an explicit command for bot B or sent via bot C will only be available to bot A. Replies have the highest priority.

⚠️🚨 Note: 🚨⚠️

Turning off the privacy mode has no effect for groups the bot is already in (because obviously that would be a security issue). You need to re-add your bot to those groups.

What about messages from other Bots?

From the official Telegram Bot FAQ:

Bots talking to each other could potentially get stuck in unwelcome loops. To avoid this, we decided that bots will not be able to see messages from other bots regardless of mode.

Can my bot delete messages from the user in a private chat?

Yes, but only within the first 48 hours.

How can I get a list of all chats/users/channels my bot is interacting with?

There is no method for that. You'll need to keep track. See e.g. the chatmemberbot.py example.

Does my bot get an update, when someone joins my channel?

No. Those service messages are available only in groups.

My bot doesn't receive messages from groups. Why?

See here. TL;DR: Disable group privacy with @BotFather ⚠️🚨 and re-add your bot to the group 🚨⚠️

Can you add [feature] to PTB? Can I do [thing] with my bot?

Please note that python-telegram-bot is only a wrapper for the Telegram Bot API, i.e. PTB can only provide methods that are available through the API. You can find a full list of all available methods in the official docs. Anything not listed there can not be done with bots. Here is a short list of frequently requested tasks, that can not be done with the Bot API:

• Getting a list of all members of a group. You'll need to keep track, e.g. using approaches displayed in chatmemberbot.py
• Adding members to a group/channel (note that you can just send an invite link, which is also less likely to be seen as spam)
• Clearing the chat history for a user
• Getting a message by its message_id (For the interested reader: see here)
• Getting the last sent message in a chat (you can keep track of that by using chat_data)

In some cases, using a userbot can help overcome restrictions of the Bot API. Please have a look at this article about userbots. Note that userbots are not what python-telegram-bot is for.

I'm using ConversationHandler and want one handler to be run multiple times. How do I do that?

If your handlers callback returns None instead of the next state, you will stay in the current state. That means the next incoming update can be handled by the same callback.

I want to handle updates from an external service in addition to the Telegram updates. How do I do that?

Receiving updates from an external service, e.g. updates about your GitHub repo, is a common use case. How exactly you get them sadly is beyond the scope of PTB, as that depends on the service. For many cases a simple approach is to check for updates every x seconds. You can use the [[JobQueue|Extensions-–-JobQueue]] for that.

If you have a setup for getting the updates, you can put them in your bots update queue via updater.update_queue.put(your_update). The update_queue is also available as dispatcher.update_queue and context.update_queue. Note that your_update does not need to be an instance of telegram.Update - on the contrary! You can e.g. write your own custom class to represent an update from your external service. To actually do something with the update, you can register a TypeHandler. StringCommandHandler and StringRegexHandler might also be interesting for some use cases.

Why am I getting ImportError: cannot import name 'XY' from 'telegram'?

There are two common reasons for this kind of exception:

1. You installed pip install telegram instead of pip install python-telegram-bot. Run pip uninstall telegram to uninstall the telegram library and then run pip install python-telegram-bot again.
2. You have a file named telegram.py or a directory/module named telegram in your working directory. This leads to namespace issues. Rename them to something else.

What do the per_* settings in ConversationHandler do?

ConversationHandler needs to decide somehow to which conversation an update belongs. The default setting (per_user=True and per_chat=True) means that in each chat each user can have its own conversation - even in groups. If you set per_user=False and you start a conversation in a group chat, the ConversationHandler will also accept input from other users. Conversely, if per_user=True, but per_chat=False, its possible to start a conversation in one chat and continue with it in another.

per_message is slightly more complicated: Image two different conversations, in each of which the user is presented with an inline keyboard with the buttons yes and no. The user now starts both conversations and sees two such keyboards. Now, which conversation should handle the update? In order to clear this issue up, if you set per_message=True, the ConversationHandler will use the message_id of the message with the keyboard. Note that this approach can only work, if all the handlers in the conversation are CallbackQueryHandlers. This is useful for building interactive menus.

Note: If you have a CallbackQueryHandler in your ConversationHandler, you will see a warning If 'per_message=True/False', …. It is a warning, not an error. If you're sure that you set per_message to the correct value, you can just ignore it.

How can I disable these warnings though

They are generated with the warnings module, so we can disable them using the module as well. For this example, we will use the filterwarnings method. So in your code, before you initiate the ConversationHandler, do the following:

from warnings import filterwarnings
from telegram.warnings import PTBUserWarning

filterwarnings(action="ignore", message=r".*CallbackQueryHandler", category=PTBUserWarning)

Depending on your use case, you might have to change the message, but all other warnings shouldn't be raised without a reason, don't say we didn't do our best to warn you.

Can I check, if a ConversationHandler is currently active for a user?

There is no built-in way to do that. You can however easily set a flag as e.g. context.user_data['in_conversation'] = True in your entry_pointss and set it to False before returning ConversationHandler.END.

How can I list all messages of a particular chat or search through them based on a search query?

There is no API method for that (see here). If you really need this functionality, you'll need to save all the messages send to the chat manually. Keep in mind that

1. In group chats your bot doesn't receive all messages, if privacy mode is enabled (see here)
2. Messages may be edited (in which case your bot will receive a corresponding update)
3. Messages may be deleted (and there are no updates for "message deleted"!)

How can I disable logging for the APScheduler module?

You can specify the logging level of APScheduler as follows:

import logging

aps_logger = logging.getLogger('apscheduler')
aps_logger.setLevel(logging.WARNING)

How do I enforce users joining a specific channel before using my bot?

After sending an (invite) link to the channel to the user, you can use Bot.get_chat_member to check if the user is an that channel. Note that:

• the bot needs to be admin in that channel
• the user must have started the bot for this approach to work. If you try to run get_chat_member for a user that has not started the bot, the bot can not find the user in a chat, even if it is a member of it.

Otherwise depending on whether the user in the channel, has joined and left again, has been banned, ... (there are multiple situations possible), the method may

• raise an exception and in this case the error message will probably be helpful
• return a ChatMember instance. In that case make sure to check the ChatMember.status attribute

Since API 5.1 (PTB v13.4+) you can alternatively use the ChatMember updates to keep track of users in channels. See chatmemberbot.py for an example.

If the user has not yet joined the channel, you can ignore incoming updates from that user or reply to them with a corresponding warning. A convenient way to do that is to add at TypeHandler(telegram.Update, callback) to a low group and have the callback raise DispatcherHandlerStop if the user did not join yet. See the docs of Dispatcher.add_handler for more info on handler groups and DispatcherHandlerStop.

Why am I getting an error The following arguments have not been supplied?

The callback method you pass to JobQueue.run_* takes exactly one argument, which is of type CallbackContext. This is, because jobs are triggered by a schedule and not by an update from Telegram. If you want to access data in the callback that changes at runtime (e.g. because you schedule jobs on demand), you can either access context.bot_data or pass the data to run_* as run_*(…, context=additional_data). It can then be accessed within the callback as context.job.context. Note that context.{user, chat}_data will be None, as those can only be present, when the context object is related to an update, which is not the case for jobs.

How can I check the version of PTB I am using?

There are three easy ways to do this. Two work from the command line: pip show python-telegram-bot or python -m telegram. One you run inside a python script (or the python console): import telegram, then call print(telegram.__version__).

Is there a limit on the number of buttons in an inline keyboard?

• max. 100 buttons in total
• max. 8 buttons per row

Note that this is undocumented and may be changed by Telegram.

How do I access info about the message my bot sent?

All bot methods have a return value. For example to get the message_id of a text message sent by your bot, you can do

message = bot.send_message(…)
message_id = message.message_id

Please check the docs for details about the return value of each bot method.

How do I send a message to all users of the bot?

Let's first point out an easy alternative solution: Instead of sending the messages directly through your bot, you can instead set up a channel to publish the announcements. You can link your users to the channel in a welcome message.

If that doesn't work for you, here we go:

To send a message to all users, you of course need the IDs of all the users. You'll have to keep track of those yourself. The most reliable way for that are the my_chat_member updates. See chatmemberbot.py for an example on how to use them.

If you didn't keep track of your users from the beginning, you may have a chance to get the IDs anyway, if you're using persistence. Please have a look at this issue in that case.

Even if you have all the IDs, you can't know if a user has blocked your bot in the meantime. Therefore, you should make sure to wrap your send request in a try-except clause checking for telegram.error.Unauthorized errors.

Finally, note that Telegram imposes some limits that restrict you to send ~30 Messages per second. If you have a huge user base and try to notify them all at once, you will get flooding errors. To prevent that, try spreading the messages over a long time range. A simple way to achieve that is to leverage the [[JobQueue|Extensions-–-JobQueue]].