I can't send requests to the Telegram API

Question

I am implementing the function of setting the bot's response to a user's message (a new version of the bot api was recently released in Telegram, where this function appeared).

def send_react(message):
    global TOKEN
    chat_id = message.chat.id
    message_id = message.message_id
    reaction = ''
    url = f'https://api.telegram.org/bot{TOKEN}/setMessageReaction'
    data = {
        'chat_id': chat_id,
        'message_id': message_id,
        'reaction': reaction,
        'is_big': False
    }
    response = requests.post(url, json=data)
    if response.status_code == 200:
        result = response.json()
        if result['ok']:
            print('ok')
        else:
            print('not ok:', result['description'])
    else:
        print('error:', response.status_code)
    return

However, I get an error: Error: 400 What could it be?

I also checked that when deleting the reaction and is_big fields, the request is successful, but in this case, the function is useless.

Answer 1

The root cause of your problem is that the reaction of setMessageReaction does expect an array of objects of type ReactionType rather than a simple string. So you should define

reaction = [{"type": "emoji", "emoji": ""}]

Telegram does provide a error message that helps to find this issue as part of the response. If you print response.json() in the exception as case as well, you'll see the info

{'ok': False, 'error_code': 400, 'description': "Bad Request: can't parse reaction types JSON object"}

Moreover, let me point out that you avoid the use of a global variable for the token by using message.get_bot().token - see here and here for docs on this.

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Disclaimer: I'm currently the maintainer of python-telegram-bot.