Python via Telegram! Writing five simple Telegram bots in Python

To create a bot, we need to give it a name, an address, and get a token — a string that will uniquely identify our bot for Telegram servers. Let’s go to Telegram under your account and open the “father of all bots”, BotFather.

Click the “Start” button (or send /start), BotFather will send us a list of available commands in response:

• /newbot — create a new bot;
• /mybots — edit your bots;
• /setname — change the name of the bot;
• /setdescription — change the bot description;
• /setabouttext — edit bot information;
• /setuserpic — change the photo of the bot avatar;
• /setcommands — change the list of bot commands;
• /deletebot — delete the bot.

Let’s send a command to the bate-bot /newbot to create a new bot. In response, it will ask you to enter the name of the future bot, it can be written in Russian. After entering the name, you will need to send the bot’s address, and it must end with the word bot. For example xakepbot or xakep_bot. If the address is already who then busy, BotFather will start apologizing and asking for something else.

When we finally find a free and beautiful address for our bot, we will receive a message in which after the phrase “Use this token to access the HTTP API”, a string of letters and numbers will be written — this is the token we need. Save it somewhere on your computer to use it in the bot script later.

There are several ready-made modules for interacting with the Telegram API. The simplest of them is Telebot. To install it, dial

On Linux, you may need to write pip3 Instead of pip to indicate that we want to work with a third version of Python.

Echo Bot

To begin with, let’s implement the so-called echo bot. It will receive a text message from the user and return it.

Run the script and search for your bot in the Telegram search at the address you came up with earlier. Start the bot with the “Start” button or the /start and we can verify that it works and returns messages.

Wikipedia bot

Let’s teach our bot not just to send messages back, but to do something more interesting. For example, by the entered word, give an article on Wikipedia. This is where the Wikipedia module can help us:

Preparing the code.

Bot with two virtual buttons

Many Telegram bots use so-called virtual buttons to select some actions. Let’s try to make ourselves the same!

Suppose we have two files facts.txt and thinks.txt, which contain a list of interesting facts and sayings. On each string of files, there is one fact or saying.

Let’s make a bot with two buttons: “Facts” and “Sayings”. If you click any, the bot will send a corresponding message to the user.

Bot, leading a Telegram channel with jokes

Previous bots sent messages to the user when they received commands or phrases from them. But what if we need a bot that will periodically and automatically post something to our channel?

Let’s make a bot that gets a list of jokes from a file and posts one of these jokes to the channel every hour. To do this, we need to create our own channel in Telegram, add our bot to the channel subscribers and appoint it as the channel administrator with the right to publish messages.

The file with anecdotes should be in the folder data next to the bot script.

Chatbot “Masha”

Now let’s make the simplest chatbot that will chat with the user. To do this, we will prepare the boltun.txt that contains strings with questions (at the beginning of such string, put a u:) and the answers in the next strin.

File boltun.txt Put it in the data next to the bot script. To find similar questions, use the fuzzywuzzy, which allows to compare how similar two strings are to each other. Of course, first you need to install this module:

Below, there is the source code of the bot. After launching it, write to the bot “Hello” and try to communicate with it. Naturally, this is not artificial intelligence and the set of its answers is limited to phrases from the file boltun.txt.

Conclusions

We wrote five simple bots, using the example of which we learned how to receive and send messages, make buttons, and understand inaccurate requests.

In the next article, we will look at working with Telegram bots in more detail: we will learn how to make bots that work through webhooks, accept payments from users, and interact with the SQLite database.

I also urge you not to delay and sign up for the course “Python for beginners”, where we will move from the simplest concepts to creating the first interesting projects. We start very soon!