Telegram bot not responding as expected with news headlines

Other Questions Telegram bot
1

I’m working on a Telegram bot to fetch COVID-19 news headlines. I’ve got a web scraping function that works fine on its own:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup as soup

def fetch_news():
    page = requests.get('https://example-news.com/covid')
    content = soup(page.text, 'html.parser')
    titles = content.find_all('h3', class_='article-title')
    for title in titles:
        print(title.text.strip())

fetch_news()

This gives me the headlines I want. But when I try to use it in my bot code, it’s not working:

import telegram
from telegram.ext import Updater, MessageHandler, Filters

def fetch_news():
    # Same as above

bot = telegram.Bot('my-token')
updater = Updater('my-token', use_context=True)

def respond(update, context):
    if update.message.text == 'News':
        headlines = fetch_news()
        bot.send_message(chat_id=update.effective_chat.id, text=headlines)

updater.dispatcher.add_handler(MessageHandler(Filters.text, respond))
updater.start_polling()

I’m getting an error: ‘Message text is empty’. Should I change the fetch_news function or fix something in the bot’s response code? Any help would be great!

2

Your bot isn’t receiving any headlines because the fetch_news function only prints them instead of returning them. Instead of printing, try storing the headlines in a list, join them into a single string, and then return this string. That way, when the bot calls fetch_news, there will be content to send back in its message.

For example:

 def fetch_news():
     page = requests.get('https://example-news.com/covid')
     content = soup(page.text, 'html.parser')
     titles = content.find_all('h3', class_='article-title')
     headlines = [title.text.strip() for title in titles]
     return '\n'.join(headlines)

This adjustment should fix the ‘Message text is empty’ error by ensuring the bot actually gets data to output.

3

I’ve run into this exact issue before when building a news bot. The problem isn’t with your fetch_news function, but how you’re handling the data it produces. You’re printing the headlines instead of returning them, so your bot has nothing to send.

Here’s a quick fix that should work:

 def fetch_news():
     page = requests.get('https://example-news.com/covid')
     content = soup(page.text, 'html.parser')
     titles = content.find_all('h3', class_='article-title')
     headlines = [title.text.strip() for title in titles]
     return '\n'.join(headlines)

 def respond(update, context):
     if update.message.text == 'News':
         headlines = fetch_news()
         bot.send_message(chat_id=update.effective_chat.id, text=headlines)

This modification collects the headlines into a list, joins them with newlines, and returns them as a single string. Your bot should now be able to send the headlines properly. Let me know if you need any more help!

4

hey luke, looks lik your news function isnt returning data. try returnin the headlines a string rather than printin them so the message isnt empty. hope it helps.