Get username field in Facebook Graph API 2.0

Question

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?

Stupa

Answer 1

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.

Wizened

This doesn't seem to be the case any longer. – Sac

Answer 2

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."

Farmland

You've really just quoted the question here – Bovid

I've very much answered the question. There is no way to get the username of a user in v2.0 and above – Farmland

Answer 3

@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.

Astronautics

Why in hell would they remove the username? As you say it makes it completely pointless now. The issue here is I cannot go back to the old API as Apple is rejecting apps due to "Improper Advertising Identifier [IDFA] Usage" from the AdSupport framework required by Facebook old SDK – Erase

@pechar, I think the best solution for you would be to just generate a username on the fly using the user's first name and the FB user ID. You will have something like James1636617726627162 but at least you can overcome the issue like that. – Astronautics

Yes as you say it makes sense though I will have to turn to a more user customizable username as it is used publicly. Thanks for your tip. Just a side note the FB user ID is now per app not per user if the user has never logged in using the new SDK. – Erase

The reason Facebook removed username is that it is a unique identifier for a given Facebook user. In v2.0, to help protect people's information, Facebook moved to emit app-scoped user IDs for people who login to your app. By definition, these give you an app-scoped identifier for a user. Emitting the username would break this paradigm, so it had to be removed in v2.0. If you want to create a username for a user in your app based on their FB credentials, I recommend lowercasing and concatenating their first and last names. – Farmland

FB; we removed the user ID since it is a unique identifier and we aim to protect your data. Oh well, actually, we are making huge amounts of money with your data but we still want to keep you under the impression that you are safe with us. – Astronautics

@SimonCross lower-cased first + second name is not unique and adding numbers at the end makes identifier ugly. – Leadbelly

@AdrianKalbarczyk then i recommend you ask the user to enter a username - if one is really needed at all. – Farmland

@SimonCross What is FB signup for then?:) We've decided to go with our own registration system based on e-mail address and then option to integrate FB/Twitter/etc. It's much more transparent to our users. – Leadbelly

You can use FB as a sign in system without needing a username - it's a product decision on your end to require username. – Farmland

" but Facebook might be irrelevant by then anyway." – Inpour

Answer 4

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.

Election

This approach will not work anymore; Facebook now gives you an app-scoped version of the user ID which will only redirect to /username if you are already logged in. – Perplexed

Answer 5

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

Periotic

This should be the way to do it ^^ – Rms

Answer 6

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}

Inexpungible

Only if you are logged in. – Hydromel

Answer 7

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

#get html of a page via pure python ref. https://mcmap.net/q/25494/-get-webpage-contents-with-python
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://mcmap.net/q/73656/-how-to-extract-the-substring-between-two-markers
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)

Rms

Answer 8

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

Simply change id to whatever.

Inurbane

that only works with your facebook id, which is not accessible from the api since every id is app specific: developers.facebook.com/docs/graph-api/reference/v2.2/user – Pitterpatter