Telethon Telegram API - Resolving invite link WITHOUT invoking ResolveUsernameRequest

Question

I am currently building a software suite which takes in a few thousand telegram channels via their links (i.e. https://t.me/telegram_channel) and scrapes messages from them in order to do sentiment analysis. Everything works fine with the Telegram API and Telethon, however there is one problem I keep running into. In order to resolve the channel ID and user hash for each of these telegram channels, I need to run:

client.get_entity("https://t.me/telegram_channel")

However, this VERY quickly triggers FloodWaitErrors from the Telegram API, presumably because it thinks I may be attempting to resolve Telegram user's usernames in order to spam them.

That's not the case though. I am ONLY resolving public channels, not users or chats. I've searched for hours through the Telegram docs, and have not found a way to resolve a channel link WITHOUT invoking ResolveUsernameRequest and thus triggering a FloodWaitError. Is this possible to do without causing this rate limit?

Thanks!

Answer 1

This is because your own created API_ID and API_HASH are not official. It will run into FloodWaitErrors if you perform too many requests.

The easy way to solve this problem is by using an Official API.

Solution 1: Using tdesktop's API:

• The official Telegram Desktop app is using this API below:

  API_ID = 2040
  API_HASH = "b18441a1ff607e10a989891a5462e627"
  

• Use it with Telethon:

  client = TelegramClient("session", 2040, "b18441a1ff607e10a989891a5462e627")
  

However, there is a catch, as you can see in the initConnection request of Telegram API, there are more than just API_ID and API_HASH, it also needs other parameters such as device_model or lang_pack. Telethon does provide you a way to set these parameters via TelegramClient.__init__, but it doesn't let you set the lang_pack parameters because it's for official apps only.

So that brings us to Solution 2.

Solution 2: Using a wrapper library of Telethon which provides official APIs.

• There is a library called opentele that provides a neat way to use official APIs, including the API of Desktop, Android, iOS, macOS,... that currently being used by official apps.
• First you need to install it from PyPi:

  pip install opentele

• Then run the example code below:

  from opentele.tl import TelegramClient
  from opentele.api import API
  import asyncio
  
  async def main():
  
      api = API.TelegramDesktop
  
      client = TelegramClient("telethon.session", api=api)
      await client.connect()
  
  asyncio.run(main())
  

• After that, you can use the client just like using it with Telethon.