Need help with Telegram bot: sending images and tracking user stats

Other Questions Telegram bot
1

Hey everyone! I’m trying to build a Telegram bot and I’ve got some basic code working. But now I’m stuck on two things:

  1. How do I make my bot send pictures? I want it to grab an image from a URL and send it as a reply. Anyone know how to do this in PHP?

  2. I also want to keep track of how many users are interacting with my bot. Is there a way to save their IDs in a database? I’m thinking of adding a /stats command that shows the total number of users. Maybe it could add +1 to the count whenever someone uses /start.

Here’s a simple version of what I’ve got so far:

$input = json_decode(file_get_contents('php://input'));

function handleMessage($message) {
    $reply = '';
    if ($message == 'Hello') {
        $reply = 'Hi there!';
    } elseif ($message == 'Who are you?') {
        $reply = 'I'm ChatBot';
    } elseif ($message == 'How's it going?') {
        $reply = 'Pretty good, thanks for asking!';
    }
    return $reply;
}

$botToken = 'your_token_here';
$chatId = $input->message->chat->id;
$response = handleMessage($input->message->text);

$apiUrl = "https://api.telegram.org/bot{$botToken}/sendMessage?chat_id={$chatId}&text={$response}";
file_get_contents($apiUrl);

Any help would be awesome. Thanks!

2

hey jack, for sending pics try using sendPhoto method instead of sendMessage. pass the image URL as photo parameter. for user tracking, u could use a simple MySQL db to store user IDs. increment count on /start command. good luck with ur bot!

3

As someone who’s built a few Telegram bots, I can share some insights. For sending images, you’ll want to use cURL instead of file_get_contents(). It’s more reliable and gives you more control. Here’s a quick snippet:

$ch = curl_init("https://api.telegram.org/bot{$botToken}/sendPhoto");
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, [
    'chat_id' => $chatId,
    'photo' => 'https://example.com/your-image.jpg'
]);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

For user tracking, I’d recommend using SQLite. It’s lightweight and doesn’t require a separate server. You can create a simple table to store user IDs and interaction counts. Then, in your handleMessage function, you can update the stats whenever a user interacts with the bot.

Remember to handle errors gracefully - network issues, API limits, etc. It’ll make your bot much more robust in the long run.

4

Regarding image sending, you’ll want to use the sendPhoto method in the Telegram Bot API. Here’s a quick example:

$photoUrl = ‘https://example.com/image.jpg’;
$apiUrl = “https://api.telegram.org/bot{$botToken}/sendPhoto?chat_id={$chatId}&photo={$photoUrl}”;
file_get_contents($apiUrl);

For user tracking, consider using a SQL database. Create a table to store user IDs and interaction counts. On each /start command, you can either insert a new record or update an existing one:

$sql = “INSERT INTO users (user_id, interaction_count) VALUES (?, 1) ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE interaction_count = interaction_count + 1”;

Implement the /stats command to query and return the total user count. This approach should give you a solid foundation for expanding your bot’s functionality.