Simple Rules

With Folds, you write simple code and complicate it when needed.

The most common scenario for bot to is to process a user command and reply with a message. So you can just return a string:

@bot.private_commands.help()
async def f():
    return 'I am a tutorial bot'

With this code, whenever a user writes /help in private messages, the bot will answer with our text.

You may have noticed that I named the function f. We won't use the function name anywhere, so it doesn't really matter. I like f because it's simple and looks nice. You can instead use _ or give functions meaningful names.

If we are interested in the text of the incoming message, we can accept it as an argument:

@bot.private_message()
async def f(text: str):
    if text == 'hi':
        return 'Hello!'
    else:
        return "I don't know what you're talking about. Want some tea?"

And for more complex scenarios, we can accept the Message object:

from folds import Message

...

@bot.private_message()
async def f(message: Message):
    if message.photo is not None:
        await message.download_media()
        return f'I downloaded the photo you sent at {message.date}'

Sending messages

As we've seen, return '...' is useful when you want to tell the user you're finished.

Of course, you may want to send messages in other cases: maybe send multiple messages, send a message with a file, or send a message and then do something else. Then, you can use Telethon methods.

Here are some methods that may be helpful:

• message.respond() is the shortcut to send a new message to the same chat as message
• message.reply() is the shortcut to send a new message as a reply to message
• client.send_message() is the general function that sends a message to some chat. The client object here represents the current Telethon's Telegram client and can be imported from folds.context.

from folds import Message
from folds.context import client

...

@bot.private_message()
async def f(message: Message):
    await message.respond('Searching for your query...')
    picture_url = ...  # find picture url for message.text
    await message.reply('Your result', file=picture_url)
    await client.send_message(ADMIN_USER_ID, 'A user just made a query')

For all the things you can do with messages, consult Telethon docs.