How to get a telegram private channel id with telethon

Question

Hi can't figure out how to solve this problem, so any help will be really appreciated. I'm subscribed to a private channel. This channel has no username and I don't have the invite link (the admin just added me). Since I use this channel at work, to speed up the things I want to process the messages posted on the channel using Telethon.

The core of the program is:

@events.register(events.NewMessage(chats = my_private_channel))
async def handler(event):
    
        #do things

The problem is that I am not able to filter the messages coming to that specific channel id. I get the error:

ValueError: Cannot find any entity corresponding to "0123456789"

I have tried different technique to obtain my channel Id but the error is always the same. In particular:

1. The channel is private so it has no username ("@blablabla")
2. I have no invite link
3. I have tried to process all incoming messages until the admin sent a message on the channel, print sender information and get the value from the "ID" key
4. I have tried to use telegram web and get the ID from the url (also adding -100 in front of it)

But when I put the ID in the parameter chats , I get always the error reported above.

Thanks in advance, Have a nice day

Answer 1

if you have access to the channel, then it's shown in your chat list.

You have to loop through your chats checking their titles and then store the desired chat in a variable:

my_private_channel_id = None
my_private_channel = None

async for dialog in tg.client.iter_dialogs():
    if dialog.name == "private chat name":
        my_private_channel = dialog
        my_private_channel_id = dialog.id
        break

if private_chat is None:
    print("chat not found")
else:
    print("chat id is", my_private_channel_id)

Than you can filter messages sent to my_private_channel.

Answer 2

You can't join a private channel without the invite link, nor can you get any information about it. It's private, as the name implies.