telegram-escape

A Rust library for escaping text according to Telegram's MarkdownV2 formatting rules.

Overview

This library provides the tg_escape function that properly escapes special characters in text for use with Telegram Bot API's MarkdownV2 parse mode. It intelligently handles different escaping rules for regular text versus code blocks/inline code.

Features

• Escapes special characters according to Telegram MarkdownV2 rules
• Smart context-aware escaping:
  • In regular text: escapes _*[]()~>#+-=|{}.!` characters
  • In code blocks and inline code: only escapes ` and \ characters
• Preserves markdown structure while ensuring proper escaping
• Uses pulldown-cmark for robust markdown parsing

Usage

use telegram_escape::tg_escape;

// Basic escaping
let text = "Soon you'll get a stats for today, and the overall status can be viewed by the /get_stat command :)";
let escaped = tg_escape(text);
// Result: "Soon you'll get a stats for today, and the overall status can be viewed by the /get\_stat command :\)"

// Code blocks have different escaping rules
let text_with_code = "Before `a_*~>#+-=|{}.!\` after";
let escaped = tg_escape(text_with_code);
// Inside backticks, only ` and \ are escaped

Installation

Add this to your Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
telegram-escape = "0.1.0"

Testing

Run tests with:

cargo test

Note: Some tests are currently marked as #[ignore] due to failing edge cases:

• test_escaped_characters - handling of already-escaped characters
• test_math_expressions - mathematical operators escaping

Dependencies

• pulldown-cmark - Markdown parsing
• pulldown-cmark-to-cmark - Markdown serialization (using custom fork)
• regex - Pattern matching for escape characters

License

See LICENSE file for details.

Author

Vlad Stepanov utterstep@hey.com