account.checkUsername from telethon not working?

Question

I am using the code snippet from the documentation of CheckUsernameRequest and it just doesn't work. I tried it with a lot of usernames and channel names . It keeps saying that they don't exist but they DO.

Here are a few I tested :

• https://t.me/lexfridman
• https://t.me/tagliafi

Am I doing something wrong ? Is it broken ?

PS: I don't understand the result type either, it's supposed to be a bool but I find myself dealing with obscure coroutine stuffs.

The code:

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient
from telethon import functions, types

with TelegramClient('session_name', api_id, api_hash) as client:
    result = client(functions.account.CheckUsernameRequest(
        username='lexfridman'
    ))
    if result == True:
        print("yAY")
    else:
        print("pOUAH")

Answer 1

Got this problem too. Telegram has several methods for working with usernames. I guess you need contacts.ResolveUsernameRequest. It raises UsernameNotOccupiedError, if it can't find the username; otherwise it returns ResolvedPeer.

To get it to work properly, you need to use an async function:

async def main():
    async with TelegramClient('session_name', api_id, api_hash) as client:
        try:
            await client(functions.contacts.ResolveUsernameRequest('lexfridman'))
            print('Found!')
        except UsernameNotOccupiedError as e:
            print('Not found :(')