How can I download the chat history of a group in Telegram?

Question

I would like to download the chat history (all messages) that were posted in a public group on Telegram. How can I do this with python?

I've found this method in the API https://core.telegram.org/method/messages.getHistory which I think looks like what I'm trying to do. But how do I actually call it? It seems there's no python examples for the MTproto protocol they use.

I also looked at the Bot API, but it doesn't seem to have a method to download messages.

Answer 1

You can use Telethon . Telegram API is fairly complicated and with the telethon, you can start using telegram API in a very short time without any pre-knowledge about the API.

pip install telethon

Then register your app (taken from telethon):

the link is: https://my.telegram.org/

Then to obtain message history of a group (assuming you have the group id):

chat_id = YOUR_CHAT_ID
api_id=YOUR_API_ID
api_hash = 'YOUR_API_HASH'

from telethon import TelegramClient
from telethon.tl.types.input_peer_chat import InputPeerChat

client = TelegramClient('session_id', api_id=api_id, api_hash=api_hash)
client.connect()
chat = InputPeerChat(chat_id)

total_count, messages, senders = client.get_message_history(
                        chat, limit=10)

for msg in reversed(messages):
    # Format the message content
    if getattr(msg, 'media', None):
        content = '<{}> {}'.format(  # The media may or may not have a caption
        msg.media.__class__.__name__,
        getattr(msg.media, 'caption', ''))
    elif hasattr(msg, 'message'):
        content = msg.message
    elif hasattr(msg, 'action'):
        content = str(msg.action)
    else:
        # Unknown message, simply print its class name
        content = msg.__class__.__name__

    text = '[{}:{}] (ID={}) {}: {} type: {}'.format(
            msg.date.hour, msg.date.minute, msg.id, "no name",
            content)
    print (text)

The example is taken and simplified from telethon example .

Answer 2

With an update (August 2018) now Telegram Desktop application supports saving chat history very conveniently. You can store it as json or html formatted.

To use this feature, make sure you have the latest version of Telegram Desktop installed on your computer, then click Settings > Export Telegram data.

https://telegram.org/blog/export-and-more

Answer 3

Now, you can use TDesktop to export chats.

Here is the blog post about Aug 2018 update.

---

Original Answer:

Telegram MTProto is hard to use to newbies, so I recommend telegram-cli.

You can use third-party tg-export script, but still not easy to newbies too.

Answer 4

The currently accepted answer is for very old versions of Telethon. With Telethon 1.0, the code can and should be simplified to the following:

# chat can be:
# * int id (-12345)
# * str username (@chat)
# * str phone number (+12 3456)
# * Peer (types.PeerChat(12345))
# * InputPeer (types.InputPeerChat(12345))
# * Chat object (types.Chat)
# * ...and many more types
chat = ...
api_id = ...
api_hash = ...

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient

client = TelegramClient('session_id', api_id, api_hash)

with client:
    # 10 is the limit on how many messages to fetch. Remove or change for more.
    for msg in client.iter_messages(chat, 10):
        print(msg.sender.first_name, ':', msg.text)

Applying any formatting is still possible but hasattr is no longer needed. if msg.media for example would be enough to check if the message has media.

A note, if you're using Jupyter, you need to use async directly:

from telethon import TelegramClient

client = TelegramClient('session_id', api_id, api_hash)

# Note `async with` and `async for`
async with client:
    async for msg in client.iter_messages(chat, 10):
        print(msg.sender.first_name, ':', msg.text)

Answer 5

You can use the Telethon library. for this you need to register your app and connect your client code to it (look at this ). Then to obtain message history of a entry (such as channel, group or chat):

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient
from telethon.errors import SessionPasswordNeededError


client = TelegramClient(username, api_id, api_hash, proxy=("socks5", proxy_ip, proxy_port))  # if in your country telegram is banned, you can use the proxy, otherwise remove it.
client.start()

# for login
if not client.is_user_authorized():
    client.send_code_request(phone)
    try:
        client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))
    except SessionPasswordNeededError:
        client.sign_in(password=input('Password: '))

async for message in client.iter_messages(chat_id, wait_time=0):            
    messages.append(Message(message))
        # write your code

Answer 6

you can use telepot ( documentation here ) for python, eg:

import telepot

token = 'your_token'
bot = telepot.Bot(token)
tmp_history = bot.getUpdates()
print(tmp_history['result'])

but you may run down with limit of 100 records in history read this about it

Answer 7

The great language-agnostic way to use the Telegram API is to use the https://www.taas.ru/ .

You need to sign in and create an API Key. Then you can make the following request to get the chat history

GET https://www.t-a-a-s.ru/client
{
  "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
  "@type": "getChatHistory",
  "chat_id": "xxxxxxxxxxx",
  "from_message_id": '0',
  "offset": 0,
  "limit": 100,
}