Creating a TeleBot

Getting Started

1. Open up the IDE of your choice (PyCharm, VS Code, Google Colab, etc.)

2. Locate the terminal - usually found in a panel at the bottom or side of your IDE

3. Install the telebot package by typing pip install python-telegram-bot Note: Colab uses ! as a prefix to shell commands

4. Run the command

Link to the Library: https://github.com/python-telegram-bot/python-telegram-bot

Creating a Bot

• Launch Telegram

• Search for the user @BotFather

BotFather on Telegram

• Create a new bot by using the command '/start '

• Follow the prompts and set the bot's name and username Username must end with "bot" -> e.g. 'untitled_bot'

• Receive your bot token: BotFather will provide you with a unique token that will be used to authenticate your bot

Your Bot's Token

Keep your token secure and do not share it publicly

• Input token into your environment

# Replace "YOUR_API_TOKEN" with token received from BotFather

token = "YOUR_API_TOKEN"

• (Optional) Add a description, profile picture, etc.

Import Packages

We will be creating the telebot in the context of Google Colab!

So, let's get started! Paste the following code blocks into your file:

1. Allow for asynchronous programming capabilities

# Workaround for nested event loops in Jupyter (Google Colab)
# Jupyter notebooks already have a running loop via Tornado and the asyncio lib does not allow a nested loop, we need to use a separate package called nest_asyncio

import asyncio
import nest_asyncio

nest_asyncio.apply() 

# for non-Jupyter notebook IDE's

import asyncio

1. Enable logging

import logging

logging.basicConfig(
    format='%(asctime)s - %(name)s - %(levelname)s - %(message)s', 
    level=logging.INFO
)

logger = logging.getLogger(__name__)

This is setting up logging module, so you know when (and why) things don't work as expected.

Click here for more info.

1. Import from telegram package

from telegram import Update
from telegram.constants import ParseMode
from telegram import InlineQueryResultArticle, InputTextMessageContent
from telegram.ext import filters, MessageHandler, ApplicationBuilder, CommandHandler, ContextTypes, InlineQueryHandler

1. (Optional) Other useful packages

import math
from random import random
import datetime