The Full API

Important

While you have access to this, you should always use the friendly methods listed on Client Reference unless you have a better reason not to, like a method not existing or you wanting more control.

The TelegramClient 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://lonamiwebs.github.io/Telethon 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 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() didn’t exist, we could use the search to look for “message”. There we would find 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 InputPeer, and a message which is just a Python string.

How can we retrieve this 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():

import telethon.sync
peer = client.get_input_entity('someone')

When you’re going to invoke an API method, most require you to pass an InputUser, InputChat, or so on, this is why using client.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() instead:

entity = 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 for you when required, but it’s good to remember what’s happening.

After this small parenthesis about client.get_entity versus client.get_input_entity(), we have everything we need. To invoke our request we do:

result = 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 = client(SendMessageRequest(
    client.get_input_entity('username'), 'Hello there!'
))

This can further be simplified to:

result = client(SendMessageRequest('username', 'Hello there!'))
# Or even
result = 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.

Requests in Parallel

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:

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:
    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]