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Changelog

Source: NEWS.md

telegramR (development version)

  • Faster TL decoding: a 100-message messages.ChannelMessages page now parses about 2.5x faster as full objects, and the first parsed response after loading the package no longer spends ~8 s building the constructor map. The constructor index is computed at install time, cached outside options(), and TL classes are flattened on first use so R6 no longer builds a super object per instance.
  • PQ factorisation during the auth-key handshake now runs in C++ (about 1000x faster), cutting several seconds from each new login or DC connection.
  • Strings read from the wire are now marked as UTF-8, so non-ASCII text is no longer garbled under non-UTF-8 locales.
  • download_channel_messages(), download_channel_reactions() and download_channel_replies() decode messages as lightweight lists instead of R6 objects (opt out with options(telegramR.lite_messages = FALSE)); with the other changes below, going from a raw 100-message response to tibble rows is about 20x faster than in 0.0.2 (1.7 s -> 80 ms).
  • 64-bit TL longs are decoded natively (still returned as gmp::bigz).
  • In those download functions, messages are now decoded by a compiled, table-driven decoder (src/tl_decode.cpp) built at install time from the generated TL parsers: a 100-message page decodes in ~15 ms instead of ~1.7 s in 0.0.2 (~100x). Its output is identical to the R decoder’s (checked on ~4800 random objects covering every constructor, clean and corrupted); anything it does not cover is decoded by R. Disable with options(telegramR.fast_decode = FALSE).
  • Building rows from messages is faster: timestamps no longer re-parse the origin string on every call.
  • A corrupted vector length in a response no longer triggers a multi-gigabyte allocation (which could get the R session killed): every count read from the wire is checked against the bytes left.
  • Fixed download_channel_reactions() and download_channel_replies() reporting zero reactions (reactions_json = "[]") for every message.
  • Decoding problems are no longer silent: an unknown constructor or a parser error raises a telegramR_parse_warning, and a messages.channelMessages page that could not be fully decoded is marked incomplete = TRUE.
  • MTProto session ids are now random 64-bit values (previously 31-bit).
  • The request classes’ $fromReader() methods now work with a real BinaryReader (it gained the camelCase method names they call).
  • MTProtoState$decrypt_message_data() no longer short-circuits when running under testthat; its tests now decrypt real server-direction messages.
  • Consistent, informative console output built on ‘cli’: connection and sign-in status, rate-limit waits and data-centre switches are reported as short ℹ/✔/! lines; the download functions show a progress bar with rate and ETA (interactive sessions) and finish with a one-line summary (rows, date range, elapsed time, output file). Internal details (server salts, sender pools) are only shown with options(telegramR.verbose = "debug"); options(telegramR.verbose = FALSE) silences everything. The ‘logger’ dependency is dropped.
  • Fixed file-download retries (timeouts, files in another data centre, expired file references) and CDN redirects calling logging methods that did not exist, which turned a recoverable situation into an error.
  • Removed compiled objects (src/*.o, src/*.so) from version control; they broke installation from a git checkout on other platforms.

telegramR 0.0.2

CRAN release: 2026-09-30

  • Removed unused sample video files from inst/extdata, shrinking the source tarball to ~3.4Mb (under CRAN’s 5Mb guideline).

  • Exported TelegramClient, the high-level client class, so TelegramClient$new() works after library(telegramR) (its @export had been in a comment that roxygen ignored, leaving it inaccessible).

  • Synced the bundled ‘Telegram’ TL schema to layer 229 and regenerated all TL type and request classes, fixing dialog and message parsing against current ‘Telegram’ servers.

  • Reworked the schema code-generation tooling in data-raw/ entirely in R (generate_tl.R, overwrite_stale.R, dedupe_types.R, emit_missing.R, and the regenerate.R pipeline), replacing the previous scripts. The pipeline is idempotent and documents every generated class with roxygen.

  • Fixed serialisation of 64-bit integers and byte fields, and the send-media chain.

  • Fixed the asynchronous test helpers to resolve promises objects, and a latent unqualified openssl::rand_bytes() call in the obfuscated transport.

telegramR 0.0.1

CRAN release: 2026-06-02

  • Initial CRAN release.
  • Full MTProto client for Telegram: authentication, serialisation/deserialisation of the TL schema, encrypted transport, and session management.
  • High-level helpers for downloading channel messages, reactions, and replies at scale (download_channel_messages(), batch_download_channels()).
  • Two-factor authentication support via PasswordKdf.
  • Story support via functions_stories.R request classes.