MWE

How to write a Minimal Working Example

If you read this, you probably were asked to provide a minimal working example (MWE) in the user group or the issue tracker of the python-telegram-bot library.

So here is what that means:

Example

When trying to help you with a problem, it's often helpful to see your code instead of a vague description of the issue. Of course, a better description often also helps (see this article on asking good technical questions).

Working

In order for the example to actually be helpful, it must work. This means that it:

Is ready to run

Code that's not runnable is not very useful to see an issue - at least most times. Make sure that whoever is trying to help you only needs to plug in a bot token, run the script and send /start to the bot for the example to run.

In particular this means that

• all necessary imports are included
• no undefined functions are called or undefined modules imported
• apart from PTB no additional dependencies need to be installed

Reproduces the issue

If the provided example doesn't show the described problem, it's not much of an example.

Minimal

Make sure that your example contains everything needed for the problem to show - and nothing more! Nothing delays finding a bug more than hundreds of unrelated lines of code. Your example should fit in a single short file. Reducing your problematic code to such a minimal example often times already helps to identify the actual issue.

Publishing

Be sure to remove your bot token before publishing the MWE! Always send it along with a concise description of what exactly the problem is and how it can be reproduced with your MWE.

As a final note, if you were asked for an MWE in the user group, please post your code using a pastebin, e.g. https://hastebin.com or https://pastebin.com, instead of posting it as plain text in the user group.