PHP tutorial: Send Telegram Bot API messages using cURL with proper error handling

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A developer tutorial on DEV Community demonstrates how to build a lightweight, dependency-free PHP helper function that sends messages via the Telegram Bot API using cURL. The helper handles HTTP status checks, JSON response validation, and correctly treats Telegram's ok:false envelope as a failure even when the HTTP status code is 200. It reads the bot token securely from environment variables rather than hardcoding it in source files. The tutorial also covers HTML escaping for user-supplied text to prevent malformed entity errors when using Telegram's HTML parse mode. Timeout configuration and cURL error detection are included, though webhook setup and rate-limiting are explicitly out of scope.

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