How to Store Telegram User and Chat IDs Correctly

Each user, bot, group, or channel has an invariable ID. You can enable showing chat IDs in Telegram macOS settings or Telegram Desktop experimental settings.

WARNING

Don't store user and chat IDs in 32-bit integers: they may be too large. Double-precision floats (such as number in JS) or 64-bit integers are OK.

Use Bot API ID prefixes

In Bot API, regular group IDs start with - and channel/supergroup IDs start with -100. Thus, a channel with an actual ID 1356415630 has ID -1001356415630 in Bot API.

Although Telethon and Folds libraries don't use Bot API, sometimes they use the ID format from Bot API. Thus, message.chat_id starts with -100 in case of channels or supergroups.

You can convert between ID formats using telethon.utils.get_peer_id and telethon.utils.resolve_id.

Read the bot ID from its token

Read the first part of a bot token when you need the bot ID. For example, the token 110201874:AAHdqTcvCH1vGWJxfSeofSAs0K5PALDsaw belongs to the bot with ID 110201874.