telegram.bot

Develop a Telegram Bot with R

This package provides a pure R interface for the Telegram Bot API. In addition to the pure API implementation, it features a number of tools to make the development of Telegram bots with R easy and straightforward, providing an easy-to-use interface that takes some work off the programmer.

Installation

You can install telegram.bot from CRAN:

install.packages("telegram.bot")

Or the development version from GitHub:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("ebeneditos/telegram.bot")

Make sure you have the devtools package updated.

Usage

You can quickly build a chatbot with a few lines:

library(telegram.bot)

start <- function(bot, update){
  bot$sendMessage(chat_id = update$message$chat_id,
                  text = sprintf("Hello %s!", update$message$from$first_name))
}

updater <- Updater("YOUR TOKEN HERE")

updater$dispatcher$add_handler(CommandHandler("start", start))

updater$start_polling()

Telegram API Methods

One of the core instances from the package is Bot, which represents a Telegram Bot. You can find a full list of the Telegram API methods implemented in its documentation (?Bot), but here there are some examples:

# Initialize bot
bot <- Bot(token = "TOKEN")
chat_id <- "CHAT_ID" # you can retrieve it from bot$getUpdates() after sending a message to the bot

# Get bot info
bot$getMe()

# Get updates
updates <- bot$getUpdates()

# Send message
bot$sendMessage(chat_id = chat_id,
                text = "*foo bold text*",
                parse_mode = "Markdown")

# Send photo
bot$sendPhoto(chat_id = chat_id,
               photo = "https://telegram.org/img/t_logo.png")

# Send audio
bot$sendAudio(chat_id = chat_id,
              audio = "http://www.largesound.com/ashborytour/sound/brobob.mp3")

# Send document
bot$sendDocument(chat_id = chat_id,
                 document = "https://github.com/ebeneditos/telegram.bot/raw/gh-pages/docs/telegram.bot.pdf")

# Send sticker
bot$sendSticker(chat_id = chat_id,
                sticker = "https://www.gstatic.com/webp/gallery/1.webp")

# Send video
bot$sendVideo(chat_id = chat_id,
              video = "http://techslides.com/demos/sample-videos/small.mp4")

# Send gif
bot$sendAnimation(chat_id = chat_id,
                  animation = "https://media.giphy.com/media/sIIhZliB2McAo/giphy.gif")

# Send location
bot$sendLocation(chat_id = chat_id,
                 latitude = 51.521727,
                 longitude = -0.117255)

# Send chat action
bot$sendChatAction(chat_id = chat_id,
                   action = "typing")

# Get user profile photos
bot$getUserProfilePhotos(user_id = chat_id)

Note that you can also send local files by passing their path instead of an URL. Additionaly, all methods accept their equivalent snake_case syntax (e.g. bot$get_me() is equivalent to bot$getMe()).

Getting Started

To get you started with telegram.bot, we recommend to take a look at its Wiki:

• Introduction to the API.
• Tutorial: Building an R Bot in 3 steps.

You can also check these other resources:

• Telegram Bot API Documentation
• 'telegram.bot' CRAN Documentation

Contributing

The package is in a starting phase, so contributions of all sizes are very welcome. Please:

• Review our contribution guidelines to get started.
• You can also help by reporting bugs.

Attribution

This package is inspired by Python's library python-telegram-bot, specially by its submodule telegram.ext.