Home

This wiki page is meant to be a place where everyone can find and contribute examples on how to use Telethon.

It is very important that your system time is on sync! Telegram won't send a reply back at all if your system time is too ahead of the current time, or too behind. This will most likely be the cause for the following errors:

BlockingIOError: [Errno 11] Resource temporarily unavailable
BlockingIOError: [Errno 35] Resource temporarily unavailable
TimeoutError: The read operation exceeded the timeout.

Please check this out before opening an issue.

All examples shown here assume that you've successfully created a client as follows:

from telethon import TelegramClient

# Use your own values here
api_id = 12345
api_hash = '0123456789abcdef0123456789abcdef'
phone_number = '+34600000000'

client = TelegramClient('some_name', api_id, api_hash)
client.connect()  # Must return True, otherwise, try again

if not client.is_user_authorized():
    client.send_code_request(phone_number)
    client.sign_in(phone_number, input('Enter code: '))

# The `client´ is now ready

The online documentation for all available requests, types and constructors is available online at https://lonamiwebs.github.io/Telethon/.

Although Python will probably clean up the resources used by the TelegramClient, you should always .disconnect() it once you're done:

client.disconnect()

Side notes

As a side note, you may come across, or find useful, these lines:

from telethon.utils import xyz
from telethon.helpers import zyx

The first one utils are only utilities, which are not related per se to the Telegram API. On the other hand, the helpers are indeed helpers to work with the Telegram API, and to make some tasks less cumbersome. You can always call help(utils) or help(helpers) once you import them to see what goodies it contains.

Possible problems

If you ever receive a PEER_FLOOD error or aren't able to perform certain requests, it might mean that your account is limited, and there's not much Telethon can do about this. Talk to @SpamBot for more information, or refer to the spam FAQ.