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It has all of the features you would expect from a modern chat platform, including chatbots: software-based agents that you can program to read and respond to other users messages.

Step One: Setup Your Bots Telegram Profile The first step in creating a Telegram bot is setting up the profile that the bot will ultimately stand behind.

To set up a new bot profile, log in to your Telegram account and start a conversation with the BotFather (BotFather), an official account that allows you to create and manage bots.

The BotFather will ask you to choose a display name and username for your bot.

In our example, weve settled on the display name WeatherBot and username DifferentWeatherBot.

Once youve landed on a valid username, the BotFather will automatically register your bot and reply with a token for the Telegram API, unique to that bot.

Step Two: Create a Webhook for Your Bot The next step in creating a Telegram bot is setting up the webhook that will communicate with your bot.

Webhooks are how APIs tell you that something has happened, which stops you from having to query the API every few minutes (or seconds) to find out whether, for example, a new message has been sent.

Telegram Text Formatting Update Object Whenever

Telegram uses just one type of webhook, which sends you an update object whenever anything happens.

There are just two things you need to know: your API token (you should have this from step one) and the URL where youll be hosting your bot.

Voila, your webhook is now up and running Step Three: Write the Logic for Your Bot Time for the fun part At this point, you have everything you need to write the logic for your Telegram bot.

Telegram Text Formatting Code In There

Heres how Ill go on I do too little programming to even have an IDE on my computer, so Ill open Notepad and start writing my code in there.

The first thing to do is initialize a variable that will make it easy for us to call the Telegram API.

Since well be receiving updates by means of the webhook, lets create and populate an array with that update data: update jsondecode(filegetcontents(php:input), TRUE) Now, for the sake of convenience later on, lets extract two crucial pieces of data from that update the chat ID and message (if the update is not caused by a new message, this field might be empty, and well code for that later): chatId updatemessagechatid.

To do that, lets create an if statement to see if the message starts with weather.

We can accomplish that with the strpos() function, which tells us the position of a substring within a string: if (strpos(message, weather) 0).

Now well get the weather data for that location from OpenWeatherMap: weather jsondecode(filegetcontents(.location.appidmytoken), TRUE)weathermain; Here we ought to implement some kind of error handling, but Im not going to bother.

Instead, lets hope for the best and shoot our bots response off using the Telegram API: filegetcontents(path.sendmessagechatid.chatId.textHeres the weather in.location.:..weather); All in all, heres what the code looks like.

Then, upload the file to the URL you used earlier to set up the webhook.

I have my own web hosting I use for a personal website, so Ill upload the file to the websites root directory using cPanel.

Step Five: Test, Tweak, and Boast About Your New Bot Now its time to test out your new Telegram bot After fixing some bugs in my code (a few dropped speech marks and incorrect parsing of OpenWeatherMaps weather data), my weather bot was up and running.

I started a private conversation with my bot (the BotFather will give you its handle) and tested out my weather command: Final Thoughts Its crude, but it works You most certainly can program a Telegram bot in less than half an hour.

However, if youre planning to use your bot in production, you should definitely spend some time thinking about the edge cases: unexpected user inputs, external API failure, and so on and so forth.