Telethon API

This documentation was generated straight from the scheme.tl provided by Telegram. However, there is no official documentation per se on what the methods, constructors and types mean. Nevertheless, this page aims to provide easy access to all the available methods, their definition and parameters.

Although this documentation was generated for Telethon, it may be useful for any other Telegram library out there.

Index

Methods (full list)
Types (full list)
Constructors (full list)
Core types
Full example

Methods

Currently there are {method_count} methods available for the layer {layer}. The complete list can be seen here.

Methods, also known as requests, are used to interact with the Telegram API itself and are invoked with a call to .invoke(). Only these can be passed to .invoke()! You cannot .invoke() types or constructors, only requests. After this, Telegram will return a result, which may be, for instance, a bunch of messages, some dialogs, users, etc.

Types

Currently there are {type_count} types. You can see the full list here.

The Telegram types are the abstract results that you receive after invoking a request. They are "abstract" because they can have multiple constructors. For instance, the abstract type User can be either UserEmpty or User. You should, most of the time, make sure you received the desired type by using the isinstance(result, Constructor) Python function. When a request needs a Telegram type as argument, you should create an instance of it by using one of its, possibly multiple, constructors.

Constructors

Currently there are {constructor_count} constructors. You can see the full list here.

Constructors are the way you can create instances of the abstract types described above, and also the instances which are actually returned from the functions although they all share a common abstract type.

Core types

Core types are types from which the rest of Telegram types build upon:

int: The value should be an integer type, like 42. It should have 32 bits or less. You can check the bit length by calling a.bit_length(), where a is an integer variable.
long: Different name for an integer type. The numbers given should have 64 bits or less.
int128: Another integer type, should have 128 bits or less.
int256: The largest integer type, allowing 256 bits or less.
double: The value should be a floating point value, such as 123.456.
Vector<T>: If a type T is wrapped around Vector<T>, then it means that the argument should be a list of it. For instance, a valid value for Vector<int> would be [1, 2, 3].
string: A valid UTF-8 string should be supplied. This is right how Python strings work, no further encoding is required.
Bool: Either True or False.
true: These arguments aren't actually sent but rather encoded as flags. Any truthy value (True, 7) will enable this flag, although it's recommended to use True or None to symbolize that it's not present.
bytes: A sequence of bytes, like b'hello', should be supplied.
date: Although this type is internally used as an int, you can pass a datetime object instead to work with date parameters.

Full example

The following example demonstrates:

How to create a TelegramClient.
Connecting to the Telegram servers and authorizing an user.
Retrieving a list of chats (dialogs).
Invoking a request without the built-in methods.

#!/usr/bin/python3
from telethon import TelegramClient
from telethon.tl.functions.messages import GetHistoryRequest

# (1) Use your own values here
api_id   = 12345
api_hash = '0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef'
phone    = '+34600000000'

# (2) Create the client and connect
client = TelegramClient('username', api_id, api_hash)
client.connect()

# Ensure you're authorized
if not client.is_user_authorized():
    client.send_code_request(phone)
    client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))

# (3) Using built-in methods
dialogs, entities = client.get_dialogs(10)
entity = entities[0]

# (4) !! Invoking a request manually !!
result = client(GetHistoryRequest(
    entity,
    limit=20,
    offset_date=None,
    offset_id=0,
    max_id=0,
    min_id=0,
    add_offset=0
))

# Now you have access to the first 20 messages
messages = result.messages

As it can be seen, manually calling requests with client(request) (or using the old way, by calling client.invoke(request)) is way more verbose than using the built-in methods (such as client.get_dialogs()).

However, and given that there are so many methods available, it's impossible to provide a nice interface to things that may change over time. To get full access, however, you're still able to invoke these methods manually.