Working with conversations

The Skype.chats field, an instance of SkypeChats, provides a similar interface to conversations that contacts does for users.

Finding specific chats

Each conversation has a unique thread identifier, SkypeChat.id, of the form <type>:<id>. If you know the identifier of a specific conversation, you can retrieve it with a key lookup:

>>> sk.chats["8:joe.4"]
SkypeSingleChat(id='8:joe.4', userId='joe.4')

Each contact has a corresponding SkypeUser.chat reference to their one-to-one conversation:

>>> sk.contacts["joe.4"].chat
SkypeSingleChat(id='8:joe.4', userId='joe.4')

See also

Definitions – includes the known thread types used in thread identifiers.

Iterating chats

Skype doesn’t provide a complete list of all conversations the user is party to. However, single or group conversations with recent activity can be retrieved with SkypeChats.recent(). This can be called multiple times to fetch the next batch. To iterate over all conversations, you might do something like this:

>>> while sk.chats.recent():
...     pass  # Just populate the cache.
...
>>> for chat in sk.chats:
...     print(chat.id)
...
8:joe.4
8:daisy.5
19:a...@thread.skype
19:b...@thread.skype

Creating groups

You can create a new group chat with a list of participants, optionally appointing some of them as group admins in addition to the connected user:

>>> sk.chats.create(members=("joe.4", "daisy.5"), admins=("joe.4",))
SkypeGroupChat(id='19:...@thread.skype', creatorId='fred.2', userIds=['fred.2', 'joe.4', 'daisy.5'], ...)