CODEWITHSUNDEEP
facebookfacebook-graph-api
trueg
trueg

Reputation: 601

Get username field in Facebook Graph API 2.0

The "old" Facebook Graph API had a "username" field which could be used to create a human-readable profile URL. My username for example is "sebastian.trug" which results in a Facebook profile URL http://www.facebook.com/sebastian.trug.

With Graph API 2.0 Facebook has removed the "username" field from the user data as retrieved from "/me".

Is there any way to get this data via the 2.0 API or is the "username" now being treated as a deprecated field?

Upvotes: 59

Views: 63764

Answers (8)

Nam G VU
Nam G VU

Reputation: 35374

Inspired from @RifkiFauzi 's answer, here is my solution in pure Python

#get html of a page via pure python ref. https://stackoverflow.com/a/23565355/248616
import requests
r = requests.get('http://fb.com/%s' % FB_USER_ID) #open profile page of the facebook user
r.raise_for_status()
html = r.content

#search string with regex ref. https://stackoverflow.com/a/4667014/248616
import re
# m = re.search('meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0; URL=/([^?]+)\?', html)
m = re.search('a class="profileLink" href="([^"]+)"', html)
href = m.group(1) #will be https://www.facebook.com/$FB_USER_NAME on 201705.24
username = href.split('/')[-1]
print(href)
print(username)

Upvotes: -4

Stefan
Stefan

Reputation: 1294

@Simon Cross - It being deprecated is documented, yes. That is not the question, the question is how to get it and -furthermore- I wonder why Facebook has made such a terrible choice and removed the username. Hundreds of applications that rely on the username to create accounts on their service will be broken.

@user3596238 - You can stick with the V.1 API which will be around until the end of April 2015, by far not the best solution but Facebook might be irrelevant by then anyway. https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog

Solution: ask the user for a username besides the actual Facebook login? - In my opinion, that makes the Facebook login completely pointless anyway.

Upvotes: 20

Matt Way
Matt Way

Reputation: 33141

While the 2.0 SDK will not provide the username field any longer, it is quite easily scraped if you have the user id number (which you will likely be using to access the graph anyway).

The url facebook.com/<user id> will redirect to facebook.com/<username>, which can then be extracted however you like.

Upvotes: 7

Akshat Goel
Akshat Goel

Reputation: 786

One of the ways could be to access facebook.com/{userid} using cURL and then follow the redirect.

The page rediects to facebook.com/{username}

Upvotes: 2

kubido
kubido

Reputation: 568

my approach is scrapping the username using nokogiri through the user profile. kinda like this (in ruby):

html = RestClient.get("http://facebook.com/123123xxx)
doc = Nokogiri::HTML(html)
username = doc.css('head meta')[1].attributes["content"].value

Upvotes: 5

Nico Zarris
Nico Zarris

Reputation: 360

Facebook got rid of the username because the username is one way of sending emails via Facebook.

For example, given the url http://www.facebook.com/sebastian.trug

the corresponding Facebook email would be [email protected]

which, if emailed, would be received to messages directly (if the message setting is set to public), otherwise to the other inbox.

Upvotes: 31

user3788486
user3788486

Reputation: 88

https://graph.facebook.com/?id=100005908663675

Simply change id to whatever.

Upvotes: -8

Simon Cross
Simon Cross

Reputation: 13345

The username field of the User object has been removed, and does not exist in Graph API v2.0. In v2.0 of the API is there is no way to get the FB username of a user.

Source: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/apps/changelog#v2_0_graph_api

"/me/username is no longer available."

Upvotes: 27

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