# The Full API

Important

While you have access to this, you should always use the friendly methods listed on Client Reference unless you have a better reason not to, like a method not existing or you wanting more control.

The TelegramClient doesn’t offer a method for every single request the Telegram API supports. However, it’s very simple to call or invoke any request. Whenever you need something, don’t forget to check the documentation and look for the method you need. There you can go through a sorted list of everything you can do.

Note

The reason to keep both https://tl.telethon.dev and this documentation alive is that the former allows instant search results as you type, and a “Copy import” button. If you like namespaces, you can also do `from telethon.tl import types, functions`. Both work.

You should also refer to the documentation to see what the objects (constructors) Telegram returns look like. Every constructor inherits from a common type, and that’s the reason for this distinction.

Say `client.send_message()` didn’t exist, we could use the search to look for “message”. There we would find SendMessageRequest, which we can work with.

Every request is a Python class, and has the parameters needed for you to invoke it. You can also call `help(request)` for information on what input parameters it takes. Remember to “Copy import to the clipboard”, or your script won’t be aware of this class! Now we have:

    from telethon.tl.functions.messages import SendMessageRequest

If you’re going to use a lot of these, you may do:

    from telethon.tl import types, functions
    # We now have access to 'functions.messages.SendMessageRequest'

We see that this request must take at least two parameters, a `peer` of type InputPeer, and a `message` which is just a Python `str`ing.

How can we retrieve this InputPeer? We have two options. We manually construct one, for instance:

    from telethon.tl.types import InputPeerUser

    peer = InputPeerUser(user_id, user_hash)

Or we call `client.get_input_entity()`:

    import telethon

    async def main():
        peer = await client.get_input_entity('someone')

    client.loop.run_until_complete(main())

Note

Remember that `await` must occur inside an `async def`. Every full API example assumes you already know and do this.

When you’re going to invoke an API method, most require you to pass an InputUser, InputChat, or so on, this is why using `client.get_input_entity()` is more straightforward (and often immediate, if you’ve seen the user before, know their ID, etc.). If you also need to have information about the whole user, use `client.get_entity()` instead:

    entity = await client.get_entity('someone')

In the later case, when you use the entity, the library will cast it to its “input” version for you. If you already have the complete user and want to cache its input version so the library doesn’t have to do this every time its used, simply call `telethon.utils.get_input_peer`:

    from telethon import utils
    peer = utils.get_input_peer(entity)

Note

Since `v0.16.2` this is further simplified. The `Request` itself will call `client.get_input_entity` for you when required, but it’s good to remember what’s happening.

After this small parenthesis about `client.get_entity` versus `client.get_input_entity()`, we have everything we need. To invoke our request we do:

    result = await client(SendMessageRequest(peer, 'Hello there!'))

Message sent! Of course, this is only an example. There are over 250 methods available as of layer 80, and you can use every single of them as you wish. Remember to use the right types! To sum up:

    result = await client(SendMessageRequest(
        await client.get_input_entity('username'), 'Hello there!'
    ))

This can further be simplified to:

    result = await client(SendMessageRequest('username', 'Hello there!'))
    # Or even
    result = await client(SendMessageRequest(PeerChannel(id), 'Hello there!'))

Note

Note that some requests have a “hash” parameter. This is not your `api_hash`! It likely isn’t your self-user `.access_hash` either.

It’s a special hash used by Telegram to only send a difference of new data that you don’t already have with that request, so you can leave it to 0, and it should work (which means no hash is known yet).

For those requests having a “limit” parameter, you can often set it to zero to signify “return default amount”. This won’t work for all of them though, for instance, in “messages.search” it will actually return 0 items.

## Requests in Parallel

The library will automatically merge outgoing requests into a single container. Telegram’s API supports sending multiple requests in a single container, which is faster because it has less overhead and the server can run them without waiting for others. You can also force using a container manually:

    async def main():

        # Letting the library do it behind the scenes
        await asyncio.wait([
            client.send_message('me', 'Hello'),
            client.send_message('me', ','),
            client.send_message('me', 'World'),
            client.send_message('me', '.')
        ])

        # Manually invoking many requests at once
        await client([
            SendMessageRequest('me', 'Hello'),
            SendMessageRequest('me', ', '),
            SendMessageRequest('me', 'World'),
            SendMessageRequest('me', '.')
        ])

Note that you cannot guarantee the order in which they are run. Try running the above code more than one time. You will see the order in which the messages arrive is different.

If you use the raw API (the first option), you can use `ordered` to tell the server that it should run the requests sequentially. This will still be faster than going one by one, since the server knows all requests directly:

    await client([
        SendMessageRequest('me', 'Hello'),
        SendMessageRequest('me', ', '),
        SendMessageRequest('me', 'World'),
        SendMessageRequest('me', '.')
    ], ordered=True)

If any of the requests fails with a Telegram error (not connection errors or any other unexpected events), the library will raise `telethon.errors.common.MultiError`. You can `except` this and still access the successful results:

    from telethon.errors import MultiError

    try:
        await client([
            SendMessageRequest('me', 'Hello'),
            SendMessageRequest('me', ''),
            SendMessageRequest('me', 'World')
        ], ordered=True)
    except MultiError as e:
        # The first and third requests worked.
        first = e.results[0]
        third = e.results[2]
        # The second request failed.
        second = e.exceptions[1]