How to add flags to messages.sendMessage call to Telegram REST API call via URL

Question

I am using very simple Telegram bot, that only sends messages, so to make it simple I only send POST request to sendMessage API via Python's requests library. But I cannot understand how to add flags to this call properly. Basically I only need to add no_webpage and silent flags.

Is this even possible? I really don't want to use more advanced tech, because this will require registering an app as well, and its just an overkill.

My URL looks like this:

https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=CHAT&parse_mode=HTML&flags=1

I send text in the post body (not sure if it's even helpful, because of the 4096 symbols limit)

I tried to bit-encode flags field, but it doesn't seem to work.

Answer 1

You are looking at the wrong documentation, the link in your comment refers to the core-api, since you are using a BOT, you should only look at the BOT API.

If you look at the sendMessage method, you'll see the parameter:

link_preview_options

Link preview generation options for the message

Check the LinkPreviewOptions for all the options, seems like you're looking for the is_disabled flag.

---

An python example showing how to pass this:

import json
import urllib.parse
import requests

url = "https://api.telegram.org/bot<MY-Bot0TOKEN>/sendMessage"

query_string = '?' + urllib.parse.urlencode({
    'chat_id': 12345,
    'text': 'Hello this is a [link](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/77986367/how-to-add-flags-to-messages-sendmessage-call-to-telegram-rest-api-call-via-url)',
    'parse_mode': 'markdown',
    'link_preview_options': json.dumps({
        'is_disabled': True
    })
})
response = requests.request("POST", url + query_string)

print(response.text.encode('utf8'))

The first message is with false and the second with true on is_disabled: