Telegram Channels Scraper

Telegram Channel Parser Actor

A Actor that scrapes public Telegram channels using Selenium and Chrome. It extracts channel info (avatar, subscribers, title, description, media/video/link counts, verification) and recent messages, then saves the results to Apify Dataset. Input is a list of channel usernames or links and a message limit.

Features

• Apify SDK for Python — seamless integration with Apify platform (input, dataset, logging)
• Selenium + Chrome — robust scraping of Telegram web (bypasses most anti-bot)
• Channel info extraction — avatar, subscribers, title, description, media/video/link counters, verification status
• Message scraping — collects recent messages with id, date, text, views, author
• Flexible input — accepts both @usernames and t.me links
• Error handling — logs missing elements, saves debug HTML for troubleshooting

How it works

• Reads input with a list of channels (usernames or t.me links) and messages_limit.
• For each channel:
  • Loads main page (https://t.me/<username>) and preview page (https://t.me/s/<username>) to extract all available info.
  • Scrapes up to messages_limit recent messages (id, date, text, views, author).
  • Pushes a single object per channel to the Apify Dataset.

Input

{
  "channels": [
    { "url": "https://t.me/somechannel" },
    { "url": "@anotherchannel" },
    { "url": "thirdchannel" }
  ],
  "messages_limit": 20
}

• channels: List of objects with a url field (can be username, @username, or t.me link)
• messages_limit: Max number of messages to collect per channel (0 = skip messages)

Output

Each dataset item is an object like:

{
  "username": "somechannel",
  "avatar_url": "https://cdn4.telesco.pe/file/...",
  "subscribers": 12345,
  "title": "Channel Title",
  "verified": true,
  "description": "Channel description...",
  "media_count": 100,
  "video_count": 20,
  "link_count": 5,
  "messages": [
    {
      "id": "1234",
      "date": "2024-06-01T12:34:56+00:00",
      "text": "Message text",
      "views": "123",
      "author": "Admin"
    }
    // ...
  ]
}