Show JSON Bot for Telegram

You forwarded a message and now you want to know what is hiding inside it: the sender id, the attachment type, formatting entities, buttons. Show JSON Bot prints all of that as raw JSON. Send or forward it any message and it returns the data Telegram handed over to the bot.

For a regular user it is a curiosity. For a bot developer it is a quick way to look at an update's structure with no code to write and no server logs to dig through. 🔍

What comes back in the reply

The bot gives you the message the way it arrived from Telegram. That is the same update object your own bot code will receive later.

Inside you can spot:

• Identifiers: the message id, chat id and sender id.
• Timing: the send date as a Unix timestamp.
• Entities: which parts of the text are marked as links, commands, bold text or mentions.
• Attachments: a description of a photo, document, sticker or voice note, including the technical file identifiers.
• Forward info: where the message originally came from, if you forwarded it.

Large messages produce a lot of JSON, and scanning it by eye gets tiring. The bot has an interface for moving through the data, so you can pick the exact part you want and get it back as a separate text message.

A one-minute walkthrough

1. Open the bot and press Start. The /start command also tells you whether the bot is alive.
2. Send any message, or forward someone else's, into the chat.
3. Read the JSON in the reply and open the branch you need with the buttons.
4. Copy the fragment you were after, such as a file id or chat id.

The /help command prints a short hint and /stats shows chat statistics. That is the whole command list, and it keeps the bot easy to use: no settings, no menus. 🙂

Who ends up using it

Most people arrive with one specific field in mind. A typical case is finding the numeric id of a group or channel to paste into a bot config.

Another common one: you are building a bot and are unsure how Telegram describes a reply, a forwarded post or a media album. Looking at a live example once beats guessing from documentation.

• Bot developers: check update structure and locate the fields they need.
• Automation authors: pull chat and file ids for scripts.
• Curious users: see how a message looks from the inside.
• Learners: compare what appears in the chat with what code actually receives.

Open source, and who made it

The bot comes from a developer who goes by dcdunkan, under the dcbots name. The source code is public, so you can read it and run your own copy.

The idea grew out of an older tool of the same kind that stopped working. The author kept the principle and wrote a fresh version on the Deno runtime. The public instance runs on a hosting platform for Deno apps.

To self-host you need Deno, a bot token from Telegram's official BotFather, and a little patience. Without the DEBUG variable the bot uses a webhook, and with it set the bot switches to long polling, which is handy for testing on a home machine.

A word on privacy

The bot receives what you send and shows it back to you. Still, every message you send lands on a server you do not control, so keep that in mind.

Do not forward chats that contain passwords, payment details or personal documents. A harmless test message is enough to learn the structure. If you need to inspect a private conversation, build your own copy from the open code and run it yourself. 🔒

One more detail: the JSON contains numeric user ids. They do not reveal a name on their own, but sharing other people's data without asking is still a bad habit.

What to do with the output

Ids you find are worth saving in your project notes next to the description of the bot you are building. When Telegram adds a new kind of message, such as a poll or paid media, send an example and see which fields appeared.

If you need to parse the data in code and not only look at it, open the official Bot API documentation and match the field names against what the bot printed. The JSON becomes readable within a couple of minutes. ✅