Telegram Messages Dump

This is a simple console tool for dumping message history from a Telegram chat into a jsonl, csv or plain text file.

Installation

From PyPI:

pip install telegram-messages-dump

From sources: Fetch the latest sources with git:

git clone https://github.com/Kosat/telegram-messages-dump.git

Then run directly from sources

cd telegram-messages-dump
python -m telegram_messages_dump

Or run after installing locally

python setup.py install
telegram-messages-dump

Binaries:

Binaries for Linux, Windows ~~and MacOS~~ are available in Releases section.

Usage

Mandatory parameters are <chat_name> e.g. @Python, @CSharp or a title of a dialogue, as seen in the UI, and <phone_num> - a telephone number. A phone number is needed for authentication and will not be stored anywhere. After the first successful authorization it will create telegram_chat_dump.session file containing auth token. The information from this file is being reused in next runs. If this is not a desirable behaviour, use -cl flag to delete session file on exit.

Note1: You can use telegram dialogue multi-word title like so: --chat="Telegram Geeks" with double quotes. However, when using multi-word title (rather than @channel_name), you need to join the channel first. Only then you will be able to dump it. This way you can dump private dialogues which doesn't have @channel_name.

Note2: For private channels you can also pass an invitation link as chat name. E.g. --chat="https://t.me/joinchat/XXXXXYYYYZZZZZ". IMPORTANT: It only works when you (the logged-in user) has already joined the private chat that the invitation link corresponds to.

telegram-messages-dump -c <chat_name> -p <phone_num> [-l <count>] [-o <file>] [-cl]

Where:
    -c,  --chat     Unique name of a channel/chat. E.g. @python.
    -p,  --phone    Phone number. E.g. +380503211234.
    -o,  --out      Output file name or full path. (Default: telegram_<chatName>.log)
    -e,  --exp      Exporter name. text | jsonl | csv (Default: 'text')
      ,  --continue Continue previous dump. Supports optional integer param <message_id>.
    -l,  --limit    Number of the latest messages to dump, 0 means no limit. (Default: 100)
    -cl, --clean    Clean session sensitive data (e.g. auth token) on exit. (Default: False)
    -v,  --verbose  Verbose mode. (Default: False)
      ,  --addbom   Add BOM to the beginning of the output file. (Default: False)
    -h,  --help     Show this help message and exit.

Increamental/Continuous mode

After dumping messages into an output file, telegram-messages-dump also creates a meta file with the latest (biggest) message id that was successfully saved into an output file. For instance, if messages with ids 10..100 were saved in output file, the metafile will contain the "latest_message_id": 100 record in it.

• If you want to update an existing dump file use --continue option without a parameter value. In this case telegram-messages-dump will read the latest message id from a meta file. In the sample below it will be C:\temp\xyz.txt.meta:

  telegram-messages-dump -p... -oC:\temp\xyz.txt  --continue
  

  In this case telegram-messages-dump will look for C:\temp\xyz.txt.meta file and try to incrimentally update the contents of C:\temp\xyz.txt with new messages.

Note: In incremental mode when metafile exists --exp and --chat will be taken from the meta file and must NOT be specified explicitely as parameters. --limit setting has to be omitted.

• Otherwise, if you DON'T have a metafile or want to ignore it, you can still open your dump file and find the last message's id at the bottom of the file and then specify it explicitly as --continue=<LAST_MSG_ID> command, along with the correct --exp and --chat that were used to generate the existing dump file.

  telegram-messages-dump -p... -oC:\temp\xyz.txt --continue=100500 --exp=jsonl --chat=@geekschat
  

In both aforementioned cases, telegram-messages-dump will open the existing C:\temp\xyz.txt file and append the newer messages that were posted in the telegram chat since the message with the message with id 100500 was created.

Note1: There must be = sign between the --continue command name and integer message id.

Note2: In incremental mode without metafile, --out, --exp and --chat must be specified explicitely as parameters. --limit setting has to be omitted.

Notes

• This tool relies on Telethon - a Telegram client implementation in Python.

Plugins

Output format is managed by exporter plugins. Currently there are two exporters available: text, jsonl and csv. Exporters reside in ./exporters subfolder. Basically an exporter is a class that implements three methods:

• format(...) that extracts all necessary data from a message and stringifies it.
• begin_final_file(...) that allows an exporter to write a preamble to a resulting output file.

To use a custom exporter. Place you .py file with a class implementing those 3 methods into ./exporters subfolder and specify its name in --exp <exporter_name> setting.

Note1: the class name MUST exactly match the file name of its .py file. This very same name is used as an argument for the --exp setting.

Note2: in .vscode subfolder you can find the default settings that I use for debugging this project.

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.