January 3, 2019February 2, 2019 by Majid Alizadeh

Scraping Telegram Group Members with Python and Telethon

Telegram is one of the best communications apps around the world. People usually use Telegram for managing their communities and promotions.

Startup companies or ongoing projects use Telegram for bringing audience attention to their products and services. Telegram Members are engaging with the community! This is what we all want. Engaged members will help to grow the community.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to use Telegram API extract group members.

So why scraping members from Telegram Groups?

It’s a nice opportunity to get attentions from related Telegram groups. You may want to scrape members from other related groups and add them to yours. Also, you can send messages to them and start engaging (Without Spamming!)

Enough Talking. Let’s get our hands dirty with the code.

Tutorial Contents

Create a Telegram App and Get Your Credentials

Go to my.telegram.org and log in.

Click on API development tools and fill the required fields.

You can choose any name for your app. After submitting, you will receive api_id and api_hash. Save them somewhere. You will use these credentials to login to Telegram API.

Install Telethon

Telethon is a great MTProto API Telegram client library written by LunamiWebs, you can check the Github page here. You can install telethon using pip:

python pip install telethon

1 2	python pip install telethon

Note: If you are on Linux or Mac, you might need to use sudo before pip to avoid permissions issues.

Create Client Object and Login

Latest version of telethon has two sync and async modules. The async module is using asyncio which is out of the scope of this article. Although you can get the same functionality using both modules but for the sake of simplicity we will use the sync module in this tutorial.

So as the first step you need to import the sync module from Telethon library.

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient

1 2	from telethon.sync import TelegramClient

Then, instantiate your client object using the credentials you got before.

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient
api_id = 123456
api_hash = 'YOUR_API_HASH'
phone = '+111111111111'
client = TelegramClient(phone, api_id, api_hash)

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient

api_id = 123456

api_hash = 'YOUR_API_HASH'

phone = '+111111111111'

client = TelegramClient(phone, api_id, api_hash)

Next step would be connecting to telegram and checking if you are already authorized. Otherwise send an OTP code request and ask user to enter the code they received on their telegram account.

client.connect()
if not client.is_user_authorized():
    client.send_code_request(phone)
    client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))

client.connect()

if not client.is_user_authorized():

client.send_code_request(phone)

client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))

After logging in, a .session file will be created. This is a database file which makes your session persistent.

Listing All Telegram Groups

Create an empty list for chats and populate with the results which you get from GetDialogsRequest. You need to import two more functions: GetDialogsRequest and InputPeerEmpty

from telethon.tl.functions.messages import GetDialogsRequest
from telethon.tl.types import InputPeerEmpty
chats = []
last_date = None
chunk_size = 200
groups=[]

result = client(GetDialogsRequest(
             offset_date=last_date,
             offset_id=0,
             offset_peer=InputPeerEmpty(),
             limit=chunk_size,
             hash = 0
         ))
chats.extend(result.chats)

from telethon.tl.functions.messages import GetDialogsRequest

from telethon.tl.types import InputPeerEmpty

chats = []

last_date = None

chunk_size = 200

groups=[]

result = client(GetDialogsRequest(

offset_date=last_date,

offset_id=0,

offset_peer=InputPeerEmpty(),

limit=chunk_size,

hash = 0

))

chats.extend(result.chats)

Note: offset_date and offset_peer are used for filtering the chats. We are sending empty values to these parameters so API returns all chats. offset_id and limit are used for pagination. Here we are getting last 200 chats of the user.

In this tutorial, we assume that we are only interested in mega groups; so check if the megagroup attribute of the chat is True and add it to your list.

This is warped inside a try, except block avoid getting an error, because some chats do not have megagroup attribute at all. So basically we skip those using continue statement.

for chat in chats:
    try:
        if chat.megagroup== True:
            groups.append(chat)
    except:
        continue

for chat in chats:

try:

if chat.megagroup== True:

groups.append(chat)

except:

continue

Ask User to Select a Group to Scrape Members

After listing the groups, prompt the user to input a number and select the group they want. When this code is executed it loops through every group that you stored in previous step and print it’s name starting with a number. This number is the index of that is your group list.

print('Choose a group to scrape members from:')
i=0
for g in groups:
    print(str(i) + '- ' + g.title)
    i+=1

print('Choose a group to scrape members from:')

i=0

for g in groups:

print(str(i) + '- ' + g.title)

i+=1

Ask user to enter a number associated with a group. Then use this number as index to get the target group.

g_index = input("Enter a Number: ")
target_group=groups[int(g_index)]

g_index = input("Enter a Number: ")

target_group=groups[int(g_index)]

Get All Telegram Group Members

The last but not least step is to export all members (participants) of the Telegram group. Fortunately, there is a function for this in Telethon library which makes our job really simple.

Create an empty list of users and get members using the get_participants function and populate the list.

print('Fetching Members...')
all_participants = []
all_participants = client.get_participants(target_group, aggressive=True)

print('Fetching Members...')

all_participants = []

all_participants = client.get_participants(target_group, aggressive=True)

Important: Set the aggressive parameter to True otherwise you will not get more than 10k members. When aggressive is set to true, Telethon will perform an a-z search in the group’s participants and it usually extracts more than 90% of the members.

Store Scraped Telegram Members in a CSV File

Now use Python’s csv module to store the scraped data in a CSV file. First open a csv file in the write mode with an UTF-8 encoding. This is important because users might have non ASCII names which is very common in Telegram groups. Then create a CSV writer object and write the first row (header) in the CSV file. Finally, loop through every item in the all_participants list and write them to the CSV file.

print('Saving In file...')
with open("members.csv","w",encoding='UTF-8') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f,delimiter=",",lineterminator="\n")
    writer.writerow(['username','user id', 'access hash','name','group', 'group id'])
    for user in all_participants:
        if user.username:
            username= user.username
        else:
            username= ""
        if user.first_name:
            first_name= user.first_name
        else:
            first_name= ""
        if user.last_name:
            last_name= user.last_name
        else:
            last_name= ""
        name= (first_name + ' ' + last_name).strip()
        writer.writerow([username,user.id,user.access_hash,name,target_group.title, target_group.id])      
print('Members scraped successfully.')

print('Saving In file...')

with open("members.csv","w",encoding='UTF-8') as f:

writer = csv.writer(f,delimiter=",",lineterminator="\n")

writer.writerow(['username','user id', 'access hash','name','group', 'group id'])

for user in all_participants:

if user.username:

username= user.username

else:

username= ""

if user.first_name:

first_name= user.first_name

else:

first_name= ""

if user.last_name:

last_name= user.last_name

else:

last_name= ""

name= (first_name + ' ' + last_name).strip()

writer.writerow([username,user.id,user.access_hash,name,target_group.title, target_group.id])

print('Members scraped successfully.')

Note 1: Not every user has a username. If the user has no user name the API will return None. To avoid writing None and instead of writing an empty row, check if the user has a user name; otherwise, create an empty string as the username.

Note 2: Similar to the username, some user might don’t have a first name or last name, so we are doing the same thing for name as well.

For some large groups it might take a few minutes to get the members. But finally you should see this message Members scraped successfully. which shows that everything worked perfectly.

So we stored username, name, user id, user hash and the group details for every user in the CSV file. You can use user id and user hash to Add Scraped Telegram Members to Your Group or Send a Message to Telegram Group Members Using Telethon. More on that in next tutorials.

Complete Code of Telegram Group Members Extraction Tutorial

Here is the complete executable code for this tutorial.

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient
from telethon.tl.functions.messages import GetDialogsRequest
from telethon.tl.types import InputPeerEmpty
import csv

api_id = 123456
api_hash = 'YOUR_API_HASH'
phone = '+111111111111'
client = TelegramClient(phone, api_id, api_hash)

client.connect()
if not client.is_user_authorized():
    client.send_code_request(phone)
    client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))


chats = []
last_date = None
chunk_size = 200
groups=[]
 
result = client(GetDialogsRequest(
             offset_date=last_date,
             offset_id=0,
             offset_peer=InputPeerEmpty(),
             limit=chunk_size,
             hash = 0
         ))
chats.extend(result.chats)

for chat in chats:
    try:
        if chat.megagroup== True:
            groups.append(chat)
    except:
        continue

print('Choose a group to scrape members from:')
i=0
for g in groups:
    print(str(i) + '- ' + g.title)
    i+=1

g_index = input("Enter a Number: ")
target_group=groups[int(g_index)]

print('Fetching Members...')
all_participants = []
all_participants = client.get_participants(target_group, aggressive=True)

print('Saving In file...')
with open("members.csv","w",encoding='UTF-8') as f:
    writer = csv.writer(f,delimiter=",",lineterminator="\n")
    writer.writerow(['username','user id', 'access hash','name','group', 'group id'])
    for user in all_participants:
        if user.username:
            username= user.username
        else:
            username= ""
        if user.first_name:
            first_name= user.first_name
        else:
            first_name= ""
        if user.last_name:
            last_name= user.last_name
        else:
            last_name= ""
        name= (first_name + ' ' + last_name).strip()
        writer.writerow([username,user.id,user.access_hash,name,target_group.title, target_group.id])      
print('Members scraped successfully.')

from telethon.sync import TelegramClient

from telethon.tl.functions.messages import GetDialogsRequest

from telethon.tl.types import InputPeerEmpty

import csv

api_id = 123456

api_hash = 'YOUR_API_HASH'

phone = '+111111111111'

client = TelegramClient(phone, api_id, api_hash)

client.connect()

if not client.is_user_authorized():

client.send_code_request(phone)

client.sign_in(phone, input('Enter the code: '))

chats = []

last_date = None

chunk_size = 200

groups=[]

result = client(GetDialogsRequest(

offset_date=last_date,

offset_id=0,

offset_peer=InputPeerEmpty(),

limit=chunk_size,

hash = 0

))

chats.extend(result.chats)

for chat in chats:

try:

if chat.megagroup== True:

groups.append(chat)

except:

continue

print('Choose a group to scrape members from:')

i=0

for g in groups:

print(str(i) + '- ' + g.title)

i+=1

g_index = input("Enter a Number: ")

target_group=groups[int(g_index)]

print('Fetching Members...')

all_participants = []

all_participants = client.get_participants(target_group, aggressive=True)

print('Saving In file...')

with open("members.csv","w",encoding='UTF-8') as f:

writer = csv.writer(f,delimiter=",",lineterminator="\n")

writer.writerow(['username','user id', 'access hash','name','group', 'group id'])

for user in all_participants:

if user.username:

username= user.username

else:

username= ""

if user.first_name:

first_name= user.first_name

else:

first_name= ""

if user.last_name:

last_name= user.last_name

else:

last_name= ""

name= (first_name + ' ' + last_name).strip()

writer.writerow([username,user.id,user.access_hash,name,target_group.title, target_group.id])

print('Members scraped successfully.')

Majid Alizadeh

I speak Python!

Majid Alizadeh is a freelance developer specialized in web development, web scraping and automation. He provides high quality and sophisticated software for his clients. Beside Python he works with other languages like Ruby, PHP and JS as well.

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37 Replies to “Scraping Telegram Group Members with Python and Telethon”

https://t.me/Lokchain_official says:

January 27, 2019 at 9:53 pm

chats = []
last_date = None
chunk_size = 200
groups=[]

result = client(GetDialogsRequest(
offset_date=last_date,
offset_id=0,
offset_peer=InputPeerEmpty(),
limit=chunk_size,
hash = 0
))
chats.extend(result.chats)

YOU DON’T NEED THESE LINE A SECOND TIME…

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  January 28, 2019 at 8:13 am
  
  You are right; thanks! We have removed the repeated part.
  
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  Rating: 3.0/5. From 2 votes.
  
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Karina says:

February 2, 2019 at 4:31 am

I get the following error

File “a.py”, line 13, in
client.send_code_request(phone)
File “C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\site-package
s\telethon\sync.py”, line 54, in syncified
return loop.run_until_complete(coro)
File “C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\asyncio\base
_events.py”, line 584, in run_until_complete
return future.result()
File “C:\Users\***\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\site-package
s\telethon\client\auth.py”, line 386, in send_code_request
phone, self.api_id, self.api_hash))
File “C:\Users\****\AppData\Local\Programs\Python\Python37-32\lib\site-package
s\telethon\client\users.py”, line 59, in __call__
result = await future
telethon.errors.rpcerrorlist.FloodWaitError: A wait of 58593 seconds is required
(caused by SendCodeRequest)

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  February 2, 2019 at 9:16 am
  
  Hi Karina! The FloodWaitError requires you to wait an extra time; so you have to avoid it in the first place. Please check our other tutorial on adding the scraped members to your group at: https://python.gotrained.com/adding-telegram-members-to-your-groups-telethon-python/
  
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Solomon ogu says:

February 10, 2019 at 9:12 pm

Hi please am a noob can you make a video on this .
It will be very help full
Cause am lost i have installed the telethon on my ubuntu server
I don know where to go to next
I really need this a video will do

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  February 17, 2019 at 8:06 pm
  
  Hi Solomon! We are working on a video, but it takes some time. In the meanwhile try to follow the tutorial step by step and let us know if you have questions.
  
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  1. Solomon ogu says:
    
    February 17, 2019 at 10:40 pm
    
    I have fixed it thanks
    Am also using the adding script but peer flood has been my major issue
    After 20-40members
    And I even increased the time for randomization to 130, 200
    Still same thing
    
    Also I a channel script to grow a channel will also be welcomed
    
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Sadiq Rza says:

February 12, 2019 at 10:19 am

i get this thing repeatedly

but there is nothing in the file just the headers usernames , user id etc

what should i do to fix it?

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  February 17, 2019 at 8:10 pm
  
  Hi Sadiq! I see you are commenting on the other tutorial of adding members. So have you fixed your issue with scraping them in the first place?
  
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skipor says:

February 25, 2019 at 12:50 am

how can i add the users to channel , and filter their recent activity ?
thank you very much

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  February 25, 2019 at 7:38 pm
  
  Hello! Hopefully, this helps you:
  https://github.com/LonamiWebs/Telethon/issues/781
  
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BijoRino says:

February 26, 2019 at 9:04 pm

Hey bro,
It works flawlessly, my question is:
what if i want to list channels instead of supergroups?

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1. bigicxxl says:
  
  March 4, 2019 at 12:33 am
  
  can you please explain how you do this? can you contact me on Emai i have one more question bigicxxl@hotmail.com
  
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bigicxxl says:

March 2, 2019 at 7:36 pm

is here abybody who can give me some link where can have guide how to execute all this commands in python? because i never used python before and not understand how to do all this? is there any youtube guide… thanks

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  March 2, 2019 at 11:45 pm
  
  There are many resources that teach Python basics. Check for example the Coursera’s course “Python for Everyone”.
  
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bigicxxl says:

March 2, 2019 at 9:07 pm

i replace only this :
api_id = 123456
api_hash = ‘YOUR_API_HASH’
phone = ‘+111111111111’

right?

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  March 2, 2019 at 11:44 pm
  
  Right.
  
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bigicxxl says:

March 3, 2019 at 10:16 am

so if everything is right why then this not working….. can anybody help me?

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sinaaa says:

March 10, 2019 at 12:13 pm

i have a error :
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “test.py”, line 18, in
result = client(GetDialogsRequest(
NameError: name ‘GetDialogsRequest’ is not defined

how to solve this error?

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  March 11, 2019 at 7:25 am
  
  Hi Sinaaa! Have you imported GetDialogsRequest first?
  from telethon.tl.functions.messages import GetDialogsRequest
  
  If yes, check the name of your file; it cannot be “telethon”.
  
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sai krishna says:

March 22, 2019 at 8:54 am

hey, when i try to add with usernames it works fine, but with user id it is showing error releted to apihash

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Mohit arora says:

March 23, 2019 at 8:23 pm

Hello sir… I have a problem in this code… Please can you fix it..

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  April 23, 2019 at 9:25 am
  
  Could you please elaborate on the problem, or you can check other comments.
  
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buqfox says:

March 26, 2019 at 6:11 am

client.get_participants(target_group, aggressive=True)
is generate WRONG access_hash….

the correct access_hash is from : client.get_input_entity(user[‘username’])

go try your self, the access_hash is different, and the one from “client.get_participants” cannot be used to add member to group because of wrong access_hash….

any clue about this one?

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prashant says:

March 28, 2019 at 12:14 am

hello mate , i am getting this error , what is the index range ( i mean which number i should give here)
File “C:\python programs\mscraper.py”, line 45, in
target_group=groups[int(g_index)]
IndexError: list index out of range

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rajesh burada says:

April 7, 2019 at 4:08 am

For scrap the usernames and id from groups..admin only can sarap? Or just memnme of group is sufficient?
Because i am not admin just member of group.

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njul says:

April 15, 2019 at 9:16 pm

How to fix it?
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “username.py”, line 1, in
from telethon.sync import TelegramClient
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\__init__.py”, line 1, in
from .client.telegramclient import TelegramClient
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\client\__init__.py”, line 12, in
from .telegrambaseclient import TelegramBaseClient
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\client\telegrambaseclient.py”, line 9, in
from ..crypto import rsa
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\crypto\__init__.py”, line 8, in
from .authkey import AuthKey
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\crypto\authkey.py”, line 7, in
from ..extensions import BinaryReader
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\extensions\__init__.py”, line 6, in
from .binaryreader import BinaryReader
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\extensions\binaryreader.py”, line 9, in
from ..errors import TypeNotFoundError
File “C:\Program Files (x86)\Python37-32\telethon\errors\__init__.py”, line 15, in
from .rpcerrorlist import *
ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ‘telethon.errors.rpcerrorlist’

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  April 23, 2019 at 8:52 am
  
  Please make sure you update/install your Telethon library.
  
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dqdqdq qdqdqdq says:

April 24, 2019 at 1:23 pm

Hey How do i input my users.csv(scrapped from groups) to actually read it
I’m not sure where to put my file name . I get error input_file = sys.argv[1]
Index error : list index out of range.

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  May 1, 2019 at 11:20 am
  
  I believe this question is about another tutorial; we answered it in the comments of the tutorial: Adding Telegram Group Members to Your Groups Using Telethon
  
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Kim says:

April 29, 2019 at 8:31 am

I keep getting “NameError: name ‘client’ is not defined” I’m very new to this. Am I putting all the code in at once or one at a time? Im so confused…

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Prince Rai says:

May 5, 2019 at 7:14 pm

which number i have to enter Please anyone tell me

Choose a group to scrape members from:
Enter a Number:

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1. GoTrained says:
  
  May 20, 2019 at 9:25 pm
  
  Hi Raj! Your Telegram number.
  
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2. BijoRino says:
  
  May 30, 2019 at 12:23 am
  
  you have a list like that right?
  1 – “telegram group name wow”
  2 – “telegram group name lol”
  3 – “telegram group name ok”
  4 – “telegram group name please”
  5 – “telegram group name thank”
  6 – “telegram group name you”
  
  so if you want to scrape from the third one “telegram group name ok” you should press 3
  
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BijoRino says:

May 30, 2019 at 12:26 am

Hey GoTrained my man!!!

help me out please

what if i want to scrape a channel which im not an admin at? possible?

thanks in advance

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BijoRino says:

May 31, 2019 at 6:41 am

1 more question

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BijoRino says:

May 31, 2019 at 6:42 am

1 more question, how can i make the script show hebrew text? its all symbols and unreadable text if the group name is in hebrew…. THANKS AGAIN

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