Sending Messages

There are many different types of message that a bot can send, but let's start with text messages.

Basic text message

await bot.SendMessage(chatId, "Hello, World!");

The chatId parameter would typically be the ID of a chat or a user that you obtained on a received message, or it can be the @username of a public group/channel.

Advanced text message

You can send messages with more characteristics:

• text effects (using HTML, Markdown, or text entities)
• attached inline buttons
• as a reply to a message
• and more...

The code snippet below sends a message using various parameters:

var message = await bot.SendMessage(chatId, "Trying <b>all the parameters</b> of <code>sendMessage</code> method",
    ParseMode.Html,
    protectContent: true,
    replyParameters: update.Message.Id,
    replyMarkup: new InlineKeyboardMarkup(
        InlineKeyboardButton.WithUrl("Check sendMessage method", "https://core.telegram.org/bots/api#sendmessage")));

Here text is written in HTML format and parseMode indicates that.

By passing protectContent we prevent the message (and eventual media) to be copiable/forwardable elsewhere.

It's a good idea to make it clear to a user the reason why the bot is sending this message and that's why we pass the user's message id for replyParameters.

You have the option of specifying a replyMarkup when sending messages. Reply markups are explained in details later in this book. Here we used an Inline Keyboard Markup with a button that attaches to the message itself. Clicking that opens sendMessage method documentation in the browser.

Observing the Message that just got sent

Almost all of the Send* methods return the message you just sent. Let's have a look at this object. Add this statement after the previous code.

Console.WriteLine(
    $"{message.From.FirstName} sent message {message.Id} " +
    $"to chat {message.Chat.Id} at {message.Date}. " +
    $"It is a reply to message {message.ReplyToMessage.Id} " +
    $"and has {message.Entities.Length} message entities.");

Output should look similar to this:

Awesome bot sent message 123 to chat 123456789 at 8/21/18 11:25:09 AM. It is a reply to message 122 and has 2 message entities.

Try putting a breakpoint in the code to examine all the properties on a message objects you get.

There are a few things to note:

• message.Date is a timestamp in UTC format (use message.Date.ToLocalTime() to convert to your local timezone).
• message.Text: plain text without effects
• message.Entities: list of text effects to be applied to the plain text
• message.EntityValues: text parts covered by these entities

You can use our extension methods message.ToHtml() or message.ToMarkdown() to convert the text & entities of a Message back into HTML (recommended) or Markdown.

More message types

Discover more message types in the next pages.