Telegram Bots: Encoding Plus Character / Plus Sign - character-encoding

Question

I am working on a telegram bot which sends telephone numbers to my telegram account. The problem is, that a '+' is converted to a ' ' blank. So every telephone number is wrong.
E.g. '[phone]' turns into '4915733000000'. I've tried to use the HTML code &#43 the unicode version \u002B and the url encoding caracter %2B and none of them work.
https://api.telegram.org/botTOKEN/sendMessage?chat_id=MYID&text=Test:\u2031 Unicode:\u002B HTML:+ URL:%2B
Result: Test:‱ Unicode: HTML:
Do you know any possiblility to send a plus sign?
Thanks!

Answer 1

In case someone is using VBA to send Telegram messages with + in them you can replace your string like that:
Dim URL as String
Dim reURL as String
URL = "https://www.webpage.com/product+name/specifics+number" 'etc....
reURL = replace(URL, "+, "%2B")
'send message to telegram code here
For more Encoding info you can visit: https://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_urlencode.ASP

Answer 2

It is possible to send the plus sign using POST method.
Here's the sample Google App Script code (can be easily adapted to JavaScript).
var options = {
method : "post",
payload: {
method: "sendMessage",
chat_id: "<chat_id_here>",
text: "+something",
parse_mode: "HTML"
}
};
var response = UrlFetchApp.fetch("https://api.telegram.org/bot<YOUR_TOKEN>/", options);
Plus sign can also be easily sent with parse_mode="Markdown".
Just checked (this time on Python using telebot library) that both options work:
bot.send_message(CHAT_ID, "Phone number: [phone]", parse_mode='Markdown')
bot.send_message(CHAT_ID, "Phone number: [phone]", parse_mode='HTML')

Answer 3

I had the same problem. I was using Java and Spring's WebClient. The only way to make it work is building WebClient using DefaultUriBuilderFactory and set encoding mode to NONE.
DefaultUriBuilderFactory factory = new DefaultUriBuilderFactory(url);
factory.setEncodingMode(DefaultUriBuilderFactory.EncodingMode.NONE);
WebClient webClient = WebClient.builder().uriBuilderFactory(factory).filter(logRequest()).build();
Default is EncodingMode.TEMPLATE_AND_VALUES so if you replace + with %2B the resulting URL is %252B. Setting the encoding mode to NONE doesn't replace any especial characters so I had to replace them manually.
private String replaceUrlSpecialCharacters(String message) {
return message.replace("%", "%25").replace("+", "%2B").replace(" ", "%20").replace("|", "%7C").replace(System.lineSeparator(), "%0A");
}
And now the + sign is shown in my messages.

Answer 4

I'am using PHP and this case was solved with rawurlencode. Below is the code:
public function send_message($tg_msg)
{
$tg_token = ''; // Bot Token
$chat_id = ''; // Chat ID
$url = 'https://api.telegram.org/bot' . $tg_token . '/sendMessage?parse_mode=markdown&chat_id=' . $chat_id;
$curlopt_url = $url . '&text=' . rawurlencode($tg_msg);
$ch = curl_init();
$optArray = array(
CURLOPT_URL => $curlopt_url,
CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER => true
);
curl_setopt_array($ch, $optArray);
curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
}
$msg = 'The message';
send_message($msg);
And now the + sign is shown in my messages.

Answer 5

I got that solved by just using this php function:
utf8_encode(text_to_send)