How to obtain Telegram chat_id for a specific user?

Question

How to obtain user chat_id in Telegram bot API? The documentation says:

Integer | Unique identifier for the message recipient — User or G

Answer 1

Using the Perl API you can get it this way: first you send a message to the bot from Telegram, then issue a getUpdates and the chat id must be there:

#!/usr/bin/perl

use Data::Dumper;
use WWW::Telegram::BotAPI;

my $TOKEN = 'blablabla';
my $api = WWW::Telegram::BotAPI->new (
    token => $TOKEN
) or die "I can't connect";

my $out = $api->api_request ('getUpdates');
warn Dumper($out);
my $chat_id = $out->{result}->[0]->{message}->{chat}->{id};
print "chat_id=$chat_id\n";

The id should be in chat_id but it may depend of the result, so I also added a dump of the whole result.

You can install the Perl API from https://github.com/Robertof/perl-www-telegram-botapi. It depends on your system but I installed easily running this on my Linux server:

$ sudo cpan WWW::Telegram::BotAPI

Hope this helps