Retrieve Facebook id from username

Question

I would like to retrieve a Facebook user's id given their username.

Example: Given helloworld return 100003263065603.

I understand that the Graph API does not allow this anymore, but several sites, such as lookup-id and findmyfbid are able to do this.

I am guessing they are doing some sort of scraping? If so, how would I implement this in Node.js

Answer 1

Those sites most likely scrape the profile page, which is not allowed. Don´t do that, should not need to anyway. Just let the user authorize your App and you will get his (App Scoped) ID. There´s no serious application for using the username or his global ID anymore.