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DECEMBER 16, 2022 / #PYTHON

How to Create a Telegram Bot

using Python
Ashutosh Krishna

Automated chatbots are quite useful for stimulating

interactions. We can create chatbots for Slack, Discord,
and other platforms.
In this article, I'll teach you how to build a Telegram chatbot that will Donate
Forum
tell you your horoscope. So, let’s get started!
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How to Get Your Bot Token

To set up a new bot, you will need to talk to BotFather. No, he’s not a
person – he’s also a bot, and he's the boss of all the Telegram bots.

1. Search for @botfather in Telegram.

BotFather Telegram Bot

2. Start a conversation with BotFather by clicking on the Start button.

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Click on Start Button

3. Type /newbot , and follow the prompts to set up a new bot. The
BotFather will give you a token that you will use to authenticate your
bot and grant it access to the Telegram API.
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Getting access token

Note: Make sure you store the token securely. Anyone with your
token access can easily manipulate your bot.

How to Set Up Your Coding

Environment
Let’s set up the coding environment. While there are various libraries
available to create a Telegram bot, we’ll use the pyTelegramBotAPI
library. It is a simple but extensible Python implementation for the
Telegram Bot API with both synchronous and asynchronous
capabilities.

Install the pyTelegramBotAPI library using pip:

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pip install pyTelegramBotAPI

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Next, open your favorite code editor and create a .env file to store
your token as below:

export BOT_TOKEN=your-bot-token-here

After that, run the source .env command to read the environment
variables from the .env file.

How to Create Your First Bot

All the API implementations are stored in a single class called
TeleBot . It offers many ways to listen for incoming messages as well
as functions like send_message() , send_document() , and others to
send messages.

Create a new bot.py file and paste the following code there:

import os

import telebot

BOT_TOKEN = os.environ.get('BOT_TOKEN')

bot = telebot.TeleBot(BOT_TOKEN)
In the above code, we use the os library in order to readForum
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environment variables stored in our system.
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If you remember, we exported an environment variable called

BOT_TOKEN in the previous step. The value of BOT_TOKEN is read in a
variable called BOT_TOKEN . Further, we use the TeleBot class to
create a bot instance and passed the BOT_TOKEN to it.

We then need to register message handlers. These message handlers

contain filters that a message must pass. If a message passes the filter,
the decorated function is called and the incoming message is supplied
as an argument.

Let's define a message handler that handles incoming /start and

/hello commands.

@bot.message_handler(commands=['start', 'hello'])
def send_welcome(message):
bot.reply_to(message, "Howdy, how are you doing?")

Any name is acceptable for a function that is decorated by a message

handler, but it can only have one parameter (the message).

Let’s add another handler that echoes all incoming text messages back
to the sender.

@bot.message_handler(func=lambda msg: True)

def echo_all(message):
bot.reply_to(message, message.text)
 Forum
The above code uses a lambda expression to test a message. Since weDonate
needSupport
to echoour
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the messages, we always
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lambda function.

You now have a simple bot that responds to the /start and /hello
commands with a static message and echoes all the other sent
messages. Add the following to the end of your file to launch the bot:

bot.infinity_polling()

That’s it! We have a Telegram bot ready. Let’s run the Python file and
go to Telegram to test the bot.

Search for the bot using its username if you’re unable to find it. You
can test it by sending the commands like /hello and /start and
other random texts.
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Testing the bot

Note: All the message handlers are tested in the order in which they
were declared in the source file.

For more information on using the pyTelegramBotAPI library, you can

refer to their documentation.

How to Code the Horoscope Bot

Let’s shift our attention to building our Horoscope Bot now. We will
use message chaining in the bot. The bot will first ask for your zodiac
sign, and then the day, and then it will respond with the horoscope for
that particular day.
Under the hood, the bot interacts with an API to get the Forum
horoscope Donate
data.
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We are going to use the Horoscope API that I built in another tutorial.
If you wish to learn how to build one, you can go through this tutorial.
Make sure you explore the APIs here before getting started.

How to fetch the horoscope data

Let’s create a utility function to fetch the horoscope data for a
particular day.

import requests

def get_daily_horoscope(sign: str, day: str) -> dict:

"""Get daily horoscope for a zodiac sign.
Keyword arguments:
sign:str - Zodiac sign
day:str - Date in format (YYYY-MM-DD) OR TODAY OR TOMORROW OR YESTERD
Return:dict - JSON data
"""
url = "https://horoscope-app-api.vercel.app/api/v1/get-horoscope/dail
params = {"sign": sign, "day": day}
response = requests.get(url, params)

return response.json()

 

In the above Python code, we created a function that accepts two

string arguments – sign and day – and returns JSON data. We send
a GET request on the API URL and pass sign and day as the query
parameters.

If you test the function, you will get an output similar to below:
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{
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"data":{our charity and our mission. Donate to freeCodeCamp.org.
"date": "Dec 15, 2022",
"horoscope_data": "Lie low during the day and try not to get caught
},
"status": 200,
"success": true
}

 

Note: You can explore more about the requests library in Python in
this tutorial.

How to add a message handler

Now that we have a function that returns the horoscope data, let’s
create a message handler in our bot that asks for the zodiac sign of the
user.

@bot.message_handler(commands=['horoscope'])
def sign_handler(message):
text = "What's your zodiac sign?\nChoose one: *Aries*, *Taurus*, *Gem
sent_msg = bot.send_message(message.chat.id, text, parse_mode="Markdo
bot.register_next_step_handler(sent_msg, day_handler)

 

The above function is a bit different from the other functions we

defined earlier. The bot’s horoscope functionality will be invoked by
the /horoscope command. We are sending a text message to the user,
but notice that we have set the parse_mode to Markdown while
sending the message.
Since we’ll use message chaining, we used the Forum Donate
register_next_step_handler() method. This method accepts two
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parameters: the message sent by the user and the callback function
which should be called after the message. Thus, we pass the sent_msg
variable and a new day_handler function that we’ll define next.

Let’s define the day_handler() function that accepts the message.

def day_handler(message):
sign = message.text
text = "What day do you want to know?\nChoose one: *TODAY*, *TOMORROW
sent_msg = bot.send_message(
message.chat.id, text, parse_mode="Markdown")
bot.register_next_step_handler(
sent_msg, fetch_horoscope, sign.capitalize())

 

We fetch the zodiac sign from the message.text attribute. Similar to

the previous function, it also asks the day for which you want to know
the horoscope.

In the end, we use the same register_next_step_handler() method

and pass the sent_msg , the fetch_horoscope callback function, and
the sign .

Let’s now define the fetch_horoscope() function that accepts the

message and the sign.

def fetch_horoscope(message, sign):

day = message.text
horoscope = get_daily_horoscope(sign, day)
data = horoscope["data"]
 horoscope_message = f'*Horoscope:* {data["horoscope_data"]}\\n*Sign:*
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bot.send_message(message.chat.id, "Here's your horoscope!")
bot.send_message(message.chat.id, horoscope_message, parse_mode="Mark
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This is the final function where we get the sign from the function
parameter and the day from the message.text attribute.
 

Next, we fetch the horoscope using the get_daily_horoscope()

function and construct our message. In the end, we send the message
with the horoscope data.

Bot Demo
Once you run the Python file, you can test this functionality. Here’s the
demo:

Horoscope Bot using Python

Recommended Next Steps

 p
As of now, the bot stops working as soon as we stop our Forum
Python Donate
application.
Support In
ourorder toand
charity make
ouritmission.
run always, youtocan
Donate deploy the bot on
freeCodeCamp.org.
platforms like Heroku, Render, and so on.

Here's a link to the GitHub repo for this project - feel free to check it
out.

You can also add more functionalities to the bot by exploring the
Telegram APIs.

Thanks for reading! You can follow me on Twitter.

Ashutosh Krishna
Application Developer at Thoughtworks India

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