I’m working on a Python script that sends messages using Telegram’s API. I encountered an error when sending a message that includes the ‘.’ character. The error message is:

Error while receiving message: Can't parse entities: character '.' is reserved and must be escaped with the preceding ''. Continuing...

To escape Markdown characters, I use the following function:

def escape_markdown(text):     escape_chars = r'_[]()~`>#+-=|{}.!'     return ''.join(['\' + char if char in escape_chars else char for char in text]) 

This function escapes the characters that need to be escaped for MarkdownV2 formatting, including the ‘.’ character. Despite this, I still receive the above error. Here is the relevant part of my script:

import aiohttp
from telegram.ext import ContextTypes

def escape_markdown(text):
    escape_chars = r'_[]()~`>#+-=|{}.!'
    return ''.join(['\' + char if char in escape_chars else char for char in text])

async def send_notification(signature):
    message = f"Notification for signature: {escape_markdown(signature)}"
    await context.bot.send_message(chat_id=chat_id, text=message, parse_mode='MarkdownV2')

I expected the function `escape_markdown` to properly escape the ‘.’ character, but the error still occurs. What am I missing here? How can I correctly escape characters for Telegram’s MarkdownV2? Any help would be appreciated!