Telegram: Sen photo into a message without showing the photo link with Telegraf (NodeJs)

Question

I'm on a channel that sends messages that contains a text, with a link (that link has not an image) and an image (tip product from amazon):

I tried with this code and it's similar:

bot.telegram.sendMessage('mychannel', `Hello https:/path/to/image.jpg`)

And it works it similar, but it remains the link. SO how can i put that way with image preview but not the link?

Thank you

Answer 1

One workaround(trick) would be to insert the link but use an empty character unicode (like from https://emptycharacter.com/)

Here is an example (I inserted the photo URL with an empty character)

some sample code to get you started:

const Telegraf = require("telegraf");

const bot = new Telegraf(" ... ");

const CHAT_ID = ... ;

function getHiddenLink(url, parse_mode = "markdown") {
  const emptyChar = "‎"; // copied and pasted the char from https://emptycharacter.com/

  switch (parse_mode) {
    case "markdown":
      return `[${emptyChar}](${url})`;
    case "HTML":
      return `<a href="${url}">${emptyChar}</a>`;
    default:
      throw new Error("invalid parse_mode");
  }
}


// Option 1: sending with MARKDOWN syntax
bot.telegram.sendMessage(
  CHAT_ID,
  `
some test text in markdown
${getHiddenLink("https://i.sstatic.net/TPKR5.png", "markdown")}
`,
  {
    parse_mode: "markdown",
  }
);


// Another option: sending with HTML syntax
bot.telegram.sendMessage(
  CHAT_ID,
  `
some test text in HTML
${getHiddenLink("https://i.sstatic.net/TPKR5.png", "HTML")}
`,
  {
    parse_mode: "HTML",
  }
);

Here we just create a new function getHiddenLink() that accepts the URL and parse_mode (HTML or markdown) and just craft a new URL representation with the empty character as the link-text and return it.