Hey everyone! I’m trying to set up a Telegram bot that can keep an eye on a specific website. The idea is to have it check the site every half second for any urgent messages meant for a certain group. If it spots one of these messages, I want the bot to immediately send it to a Telegram group chat. I’m not sure where to start with this. Has anyone done something similar or have any tips on how to approach this? I’m thinking I might need to use web scraping, but I’m not sure how to integrate that with a Telegram bot. Any help or guidance would be really appreciated!
I’ve actually implemented something similar for my company’s internal alerts system. Here’s what worked for us:
We used Python with the ‘requests’ library to fetch the website content and ‘lxml’ for parsing. The Telegram Bot API was indeed straightforward to integrate.
However, I’d strongly advise against checking every 0.5 seconds. That’s extremely aggressive and could get your IP banned. We found that a 30-second interval worked well for our needs without overloading the target server.
One thing to watch out for: make sure your bot can handle network issues gracefully. We had instances where temporary connection problems caused our bot to crash.
Also, consider implementing some form of caching to avoid re-sending the same alert multiple times. This saved us from a lot of unnecessary notifications.
Hope this helps with your project!
hey harry, sounds like an interesting project! for web scraping, you could use beautifulsoup or selenium in python. telegram’s bot API is pretty straightforward too. the tricky part might be the frequency - checking every 0.5 seconds could be rough on the server. maybe consider a slightly longer interval? good luck with your bot!
I’ve implemented a similar system for monitoring our company’s status page. We used Node.js with Puppeteer for web scraping and the node-telegram-bot-api package for the Telegram integration. This combo worked well for us.
A word of caution: checking every 0.5 seconds is extremely aggressive. We found that even 5-minute intervals were sufficient for most use cases. You might want to reconsider your timing to avoid potential IP bans or unnecessary server load.
One tip: implement error handling and logging. It’s crucial for maintaining the bot’s uptime and troubleshooting issues. Also, consider adding a command to manually trigger checks, which can be useful for testing or urgent situations.
Lastly, ensure you’re complying with the website’s terms of service regarding automated access. Some sites explicitly prohibit scraping, so it’s worth checking to avoid potential legal issues.