I am trying to send a colored text message to a user as reply, using sendMessage with HTML parsing.

bot.sendMessage(update.message.chat_id, "<span style=\"color:blue\">foo</span>", telegram.ParseMode.HTML)

Sending <span style="color:blue">foo</span> doesn't work, as span is not supported:

Bad Request: Can't parse message text: Unsupported start tag "span" at byte offset 0 (400)

I am using the python-telegram-bot v. 4.0.3.

Is there another way?

Unfortunately there is no documentation about the tag accepted by the bot, except the unit test for parsemode.

The tags that work are b, i, a for bold, italic and link elements, this is what is offered, maybe there's more but I couldn't find it in the docs