There is not a most pythonic way of doing this. It is a problem you have to program to solve.
Basically, you have to maintain some state variables concerning each user. When a new message arrives, the bot checks what state that user is in, and responds accordingly.
Suppose you have a function, handle(msg), that gets called for each arriving message:
user_states = {}
def handle(msg):
chat_id = msg['chat']['id']
if chat_id not in user_states:
user_states[chat_id] = some initial state ...
state = user_states[chat_id]
# respond according to `state`
This will do for a simple program.
For more complicated situations, I recommend using telepot, a Python framework I have created for Telegram Bot API. It has features that specifically solve this kind of problems.
For example, below is a bot that counts how many messages have been sent by an individual user. If no message is received after 10 seconds, it starts over (timeout). The counting is done per chat - that's the important point.
import sys
import telepot
from telepot.delegate import per_chat_id, create_open
class MessageCounter(telepot.helper.ChatHandler):
def __init__(self, seed_tuple, timeout):
super(MessageCounter, self).__init__(seed_tuple, timeout)
self._count = 0
def on_message(self, msg):
self._count += 1
self.sender.sendMessage(self._count)
TOKEN = sys.argv[1] # get token from command-line
bot = telepot.DelegatorBot(TOKEN, [
(per_chat_id(), create_open(MessageCounter, timeout=10)),
])
bot.notifyOnMessage(run_forever=True)
Run the program by:
python messagecounter.py <token>
Go to the project page to learn more if you are interested. There are a lot of documentations and non-trivial examples.
