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pythonbotstelegram

How to get chat_id from username in python with telebot library?

I just want to send a simple message from bot to a user in python by using telebot library. I wrote the code like the followings.

import telebot
bot = telebot.TeleBot(token="BOT_TOKEN")
username = "@keiru"
bot.send_message(username, "Hello, World!")

But this code gives me error like this

raise ApiTelegramException(method_name, result, result_json) telebot.apihelper.ApiTelegramException: A request to the Telegram API was unsuccessful. Error code: 400. Description: Bad Request: chat not found

But if I use chat_id like this,

import telebot
bot = telebot.TeleBot(token="BOT_TOKEN")
bot.send_message(5*91*2*728, "Hello, World!")

it works.

So what I want to do is to get chat_id from the username because I have list of usernames and need to send messages.

Please help me how to get chat_id from the username. I have already tried to use get_chat() method like this

chat_info = bot.get_chat(username)
chat_id = chat_info.id

But this didn't work.

Solution

  • You can't get ChatID from username: It's telegram privacy policy. The only way you can obtain user's ID is from their message:

    # Assume msg is variable holding your message object
user_id = msg.chat.id
bot.send_message(user_id, "Hello, World!")

    Personally I always keep user_id - usernames pairs for all users that have ever written to bot in some kind of local database.