Specification of mark-up format included in facebook open graph text - php

Question

When I am performing Open Graph requests, some of the responses that I am expecting to be text are having some kind of markup included. For example, when I am requesting the Name and Description of an album, in the description I get something like \u0040[12412421421:124:The Link]. (The \u0040 is actually the # sign.)
In this case it seems that what it is saying is that the 'The Link' should be a hyperlink to a facebook page with ID 12412421421. I presume there is similar kind of markup for hashtags and external URLs.
I am trying to find some official documentation or description for this, but I can't seem to find any documentation of this (I might be looking with the wrong keywords).
Is there any online documentation that describes this? And better still is there an PHP library or function already available somewhere that converts this text into its HTML equivalent?
I am using this Facebook PHP SDK, but it doesn't seem to offer any such function. (Not sure if there is anything in the new version 4.0 one but I can't use it anyway for now because it requres PHP 5.4+ and my host currently is still on 5.3.).

Answer 1

It's true that the PHP SDK doesn't provide anything to deal with these links and the documentation doesn't document that either. However the API gives all the information you need in the description field itself, so here is what you could do:
$description = "Live concert with #[66961492640:274:Moonbootica] "
. "in #[106078429431815:274:London, United Kingdom]! #music #house";
function get_html_description($description) {
return
// 1. Handle tags (pages, people, etc.)
preg_replace_callback("/#\[([0-9]*):([0-9]*):(.*?)\]/", function($match) {
return ''.$match[3].'';
},
// 2. Handle hashtags
preg_replace_callback("/#(\w+)/", function($match) {
return ''.$match[0].'';
},
// 3. Handle breaklines
str_replace("\n", "<br />", $description)));
}
// Display HTML
echo get_html_description($description);
While 2. and 3. handle hashtags and breaklines, the part 1. of the code basically splits up the tag #[ID:TYPE:NAME] into 3 groups of information (id, type, name) before generating HTML links from the page IDs and names:
Live concert with Moonbootica in London, United Kingdom! #music #house
Live concert with Moonbootica in London, United Kingdom!
#music #house
FYI and even if it's not much useful, here are the meanings of the types:
an app (128),
a page (274),
a user (2048).

Answer 2

the # describes a tag to someone,facebook id doesnt make difference between a fanpage or a single person so you gotta deal with php only.and the # should be the only char that describes a person/page tagged

Answer 3

The markup is used to reference a fanpage.
Example:
"description": "Event organised by #[303925999750490:274:World Next Top Model MALTA]\nPhotography by #[445645795469650:274:Pixbymax Photography]"
The 303925999750490 is the fanpage ID. The World Next Top Model MALTA is the name of fanpage. (Don't know what the 274 means)
When you render this on your page, you can render like this:
Event organised by World Next Top Model MALTA
Photography by Pixbymax Photography