Building a Telegram Bot - Step by Step

Sending Text Messages

Welcome to the fifth part of our Telegram bot development series. In this tutorial, we'll learn how to send text messages to users using your Telegram bot.

Step 1: Import the Required Libraries

Start by importing the necessary libraries in your Python code:

import telebot

As before, we import the "telebot" library to interact with the Telegram Bot API.

Step 2: Initialize Your Bot

Initialize your bot using the bot token you obtained from BotFather:

bot = telebot.TeleBot("YOUR_BOT_TOKEN")

Replace "YOUR_BOT_TOKEN" with your actual bot token obtained from BotFather. This line sets up your bot for sending text messages.

Step 3: Sending a Text Message

To send a text message, we'll use the `send_message` method. Here's how to send a simple text message:

@bot.message_handler(commands=['sendtext'])
def send_text(message):
    bot.send_message(message.chat.id, "Hello, this is your Telegram bot speaking! How can I assist you today?")

This code defines a command handler for "/sendtext." When a user sends this command to your bot, it replies with a predefined text message.

Step 4: Poll for Updates

As always, add the code to continuously poll for updates:

if __name__ == "__main__":
    bot.polling(none_stop=True)

This part ensures that your bot keeps checking for new messages and responds to text message commands in real-time.

Summary

In this part, we learned how to send text messages to users using a Telegram bot. You can customize the text message content and add more complex logic to handle user interactions.

Stay tuned for the next part of our series where we'll explore even more Telegram bot features!