How to get a Telegram Channel Id without sending a message to it

Question

Is there any way to find a telegram channel id without sending a message to it ?

Right now I go this way and find the channel id by calling this URL in my code and get the JSON as result: https://api.telegram.org/bot???????/sendMessage?chat_id=@?????&text=123

However, this cause sending the message "123" to the channel which is not good.

Answer 1

Check this link for help.
It is using web telegram url param info.

Adding details from the referred link:

1. log in web telegram
2. Click on the target channel then you will find the url displayed on your browser.

If it's a public channel, the ID is @name of the channel.

If it's a private channel then the url must be similar to:
https://web.telegram.org/#/im?p=c1018013852_555990343349619165
For this case, the channel ID would be 1018013852.
It's important to know that channel's IDs are always negative and 13 characters long!
So add -100 to it, making the correct ID -1001018013852.

Answer 2

You Can use Web Telegram to see each channel id in link of that page in your explorer
or

Just Simply Forward a message from your channel to This Bot: (https://telegram.me/getidsbot)

Answer 3

Fixing @scruel's answer:

In [1]: api_id = ...                                                                                                                                  

In [2]: api_hash = '...'                                                                                                     

In [3]: channelLink = 'https://t.me/BTCST_Community_EN'                                                                                                   

In [4]: from telethon import TelegramClient, events                                                                                                       

In [5]: client = TelegramClient('test', api_id, api_hash)                                                                                                 

In [6]: client.start()                                                                                                                                    
Out[6]: <telethon.client.telegramclient.TelegramClient at 0x7fc90c352290>

In [7]: entity = await client.get_entity(channelLink)                                                                                                     

In [8]: channelId = '-100' + str(entity.id)                                                                                                               

In [9]: channelId                                                                                                                                        
Out[9]: '-1001236496320'

Here's a CLI util to do it:

#!env/bin/python

import sys
import asyncio

from telethon import TelegramClient

import config

async def channel_id_from_link(client, channel_link):
    return "-100" + str((await client.get_entity(channel_link)).id)

async def main(channel_link):
    async with TelegramClient(
        "test", config.api_id, config.api_hash
    ) as client:
        channel_id = await channel_id_from_link(client, channel_link)

    return channel_id

if __name__ == "__main__":
    channel_link = sys.argv[1]
    channel_id = asyncio.run(main(channel_link))
    print(channel_id)

Test:

> ./TelegramChannelId.py https://t.me/binance_api_english
-1001134190352