Get telegram user status with telethon

Question

im trying to create a python script that checks wether the user is online or not. I succeed making a season between Telegram and python using telethon but Im really having a bad time getting the correct syntax to get one of my contacts status. Any help will be appricated !

from telethon.tl.types import UserStatusOnline, UserStatusOffline, ContactStatus
from telethon.sync import TelegramClient
from datetime import datetime

### Client Side ###
phone = "+"
api_id = 
api_hash = ""
client = TelegramClient(phone, api_id, api_hash)
client.connect()
if not client.is_user_authorized():
    client.send_code_request(phone)
    client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))
else:
    print("Logging Complete")

account = client.get_entity('chats_name')
if isinstance(account.status, UserStatusOffline):
    if contact.online != False:
        contact.online = False
        event.respond(f'{utc2localtime(account.status.was_online).strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)}: {contact.name} went offline.')
    elif contact.last_offline != account.status.was_online:
        if contact.last_offline is not None:
            event.respond(f'{utc2localtime(account.status.was_online).strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)}: {contact.name} went offline after being online for short time.')
        else:
            event.respond(f'{utc2localtime(account.status.was_online).strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)}: {contact.name} went offline.')
            contact.last_offline = account.status.was_online
    elif isinstance(account.status, UserStatusOnline):
            if contact.online != True:
                contact.online = True
                event.respond(f'{datetime.now().strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)}: {contact.name} went online.')   
            else:
                if contact.online != False:
                    contact.online = False
                    event.respond(f'{datetime.now().strftime(DATETIME_FORMAT)}: {contact.name} went offline.')
                    contact.last_offline = None
        

Answer 1

You need to obtain the User object of whoever you're interested in and then check the type of the status field to determine if they're online or not with isinstance .

You can get the User in many ways: through the list of conversations you have ( iter_dialogs ), fetching them by integer ID or string phone number ( get_entity ), or when you receive a message from them ( working with updates ). All the methods in the documentation have examples, but you're encouraged to read it from the beginning to learn how to use the library.

Answer 2

Perhaps you can use events.UserUpdate for this something like:

@client.on(events.UserUpdate)
async def user_update_event_handler(event):
    if event.online:
        try:
            user_details = await client.get_entity(event.user_id)
            print(f" {user_details.first_name}, came online at : {datetime.now()}")
        except:
            print(event)

Here you can find more details on events.