how to schedule a telegram bot to send a message?

Question

I am trying to create a Telegram bot that sends a message at a specific time, 5:30pm. However, the ways a was trying are not correct.

I wanted to trigger send_message regarding to the time and without the necessity of the user to send any /command.

import telebot
import datetime

TOKEN = 'MyToken'
bot = telebot.TeleBot(TOKEN)


@bot.message_handler(commands=['start'])
def send_welcome(message):
    message_id=message.chat.id
    bot.reply_to(message,"Welcome")


bot.polling()

Until now I was trying to add something like that, of course it is not python but kind of pseudocode just to explain:

if currenttime=17:30
 send_message(idchat, "mymessage")

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

If I understand correctly, you need to check your system time before sending a message, you could use the following code [source]:

from datetime import datetime
now = datetime.now()
current_time = now.strftime("%H:%M:%S")
print("Current Time =", current_time)

To send a message you could use the following code [source]:

def test_send_message():
        text = 'CI Test Message'
        tb = telebot.TeleBot(TOKEN)
        ret_msg = tb.send_message(CHAT_ID, text)
        assert ret_msg.message_id 

To compare the time, you may use:

if current_time=='17:30:00':
    test_send_message()