Telegram Interface

A quick tool for listing the Telegram Messenger groups that a user-account is invited into and listing the users within groups.

Github

• github.com/ndejong/telegram-interface

Prerequisites

• A Telegram Messenger account invited into one or more group chat channels.
• Setup API credentials on the Telegram Messenger account core.telegram.org/api/obtaining_api_id

Environment Variables

The following environment variables must be set with their associated values:-

• telegram_api_id
• telegram_api_hash
• telegram_api_phone

Outputs

All output is JSON data-structures making it easier to chain with other tools such as jq for further parsing and filtering if required.

Log status messages are sent to stderr and do not get in the way of pipe style tool chaining.

Example: trivial output filtering using jq

telegram-interface.py -g | jq .[].name 
20190804Z085638 - Telegram Interface
20190804Z085638 - Saving to data file: +000000000000-20190804Z072817.json
20190804Z085638 - Connected to Telegram with api_id: 12345
"Awesome Group A"
"Another Group"
"A Chat Forum"
...

Example: extract list of users as a csv using jq

telegram-interface.py -f +000000000000-20190804Z072817.json -u | jq -r '(.[0] | keys_unsorted) as $keys | $keys, map([.[ $keys[] ]])[] | @csv'
20190804Z145459 - Telegram Interface
20190804Z145459 - Loading data file: +000000000000-20190804Z072817.json
"id","username","firstname","lastname"
123456789,"awesomeuser","Awesome","User"
234567878,"someotheruser","Some","Other User"
236423423,"givemeuser","Give","Me"
...

Example: extracting the megagroup field directly from saved data using jq and a tr hack

cat +000000000000-20190804Z072817.json | jq '.chat_groups[]| "\(.id)~,~\(.title)~,~\(.megagroup)"' | tr '~' '"'
"183982374","Awesome Group A","true"
"198123123","Another Group","null"
"1734975345","A Chat Forum","true"
...

Usage

usage: telegram-interface.py [-h] [-e] [-f <filename>] [-o <filename>] [-g]
                             [-u]

Telegram Interface

optional arguments:
  -h, --help     show this help message and exit
  -e             Output the current environment variable values and exit.
  -f <filename>  Data filename to use, if the file already exists it will be
                 loaded as input without connecting to Telegram. By default
                 auto-generates a filename in the <cwd>.
  -o <filename>  Output filename, by default to <stdout>
  -g             Output groups, can be used with -u to obtain users in groups
  -u             Output users

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Authors

Nicholas de Jong

License

BSD-2-Clause - see LICENSE file for full details.