Sending a message to a Telegram channel the easy way

Today we’ll see by practical examples how to send a message to a Telegram channel.

The BotFather

In order to be able to do so, you will have first to:

• Create a Telegram public channel
• Create a Telegram BOT via BotFather
• Set the bot as administrator in your channel

Provided that you did the above, now you can send a message to your channel by issuing an HTTP GET request to the Telegram BOT API at the following URL:

https://api.telegram.org/bot[BOT_API_KEY]/sendMessage?chat_id=[MY_CHANNEL_NAME]&text=[MY_MESSAGE_TEXT]

where:

• BOT_API_KEY is the API Key generated by BotFather when you created your bot
• MY_CHANNEL_NAME is the handle of your channel (e.g. @my_channel_name)
• MY_MESSAGE_TEXT is the message you want to send (URL-encoded)

Now let’s se how to do this in different languages the easy way.

JAVA

String urlString = "https://api.telegram.org/bot%s/sendMessage?chat_id=%s&text=%s";
String apiToken = "my_bot_api_token";
String chatId = "@my_channel_name";
String text = "Hello world!";
urlString = String.format(urlString, apiToken, chatId, text);
URL url = new URL(urlString);
URLConnection conn = url.openConnection();
StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
InputStream is = new BufferedInputStream(conn.getInputStream());
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(is));
String inputLine = "";
while ((inputLine = br.readLine()) != null) {
    sb.append(inputLine);
}
String response = sb.toString();
// Do what you want with response

Kotlin

var urlString = "https://api.telegram.org/bot%s/sendMessage?chat_id=%s&text=%s"
val apiToken = "my_bot_api_token"
val chatId = "@my_channel_name"
val text = "Hello world!"
urlString = String.format(urlString, apiToken, chatId, text)
val url = URL(urlString)
val conn = url.openConnection()
val inputStream = BufferedInputStream(conn.getInputStream())…