Telegram Bot "chat not found"

Question

I have the following code in Python to send a message to myself from a bot.

import requests

token = '123456789:ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZABCDEFGHI'
method = 'sendMessage'
myuserid = 1949275XX
response = requests.post(
    url='https://api.telegram.org/bot{0}/{1}'.format(token, method),
    data={'chat_id': myuserid, 'text': 'hello friend'}
).json()
print(response)

but this returns {'description': 'Bad Request: chat not found', 'error_code': 400, 'ok': False}

What am I doing wrong? I got myuserid by sending /getid to @myidbot and I got my token from @BotFather

Answer 1

As @maak pointed out, you need to first send a message to the bot before the bot can send messages to you.

Answer 2

I was using prefix @ before the value of chat_id as suggested everywhere. I removed it and it started working. Note: if your chat id is 12345678 then you need to prefix it with -100 such that it is -10012345678. Example Postman call:

/sendMessage?chat_id=-10012345678&text=Let's get together

Answer 3

If your trying to send messages to a group, you must add a ‘-‘ in front of your chat ID. For example:

TELEGRAM_REG_CHAT_ID="1949275XX"

should be

TELEGRAM_REG_CHAT_ID="-1949275XX"