How to get username from Facebook ID - php

Question

On the Internet there are a few topics about this problem, but I have not found any complex solution. Therefore, I would like to ask you for help.
I need to change facebook id to username.
When you type web site like this:
http://facebook.com/profile.php?id=4 (num 4 is FB id), it will give you http://www.facebook.com/zuck, which is Mark Zuckerberg's profile.
On this principle I need to find out who a id is.
I have typed id 4 a got it is zuck.
But I need it for more ids, so it would take a lot of time do it manually. Please help me, how I can do it.

Answer 1

If you already have an ID of that particular user, then just add it on this url:
https://graph.facebook.com/<USER_ID>
Simple example:
function get_basic_info($id) {
$url = 'https://graph.facebook.com/' . $id;
$info = json_decode(file_get_contents($url), true);
return $info;
}
$id = 4;
$user = get_basic_info($id);
echo '<pre>';
print_r($user);
This should basically yield:
Array
(
[id] => 4
[first_name] => Mark
[gender] => male
[last_name] => Zuckerberg
[link] => https://www.facebook.com/zuck
[locale] => en_US
[name] => Mark Zuckerberg
[username] => zuck
)
Then you could just call it like a normal array:
echo $user['username'];
Sidenote: Why not use the PHP SDK instead.
https://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/php/4.0.0

Answer 2

As the username is NO more available from Graph API endpoint /user-id as discussed here, I propose another workaround here (but with Python code)
In brief, we open the page at fb.com/USER_ID and scrape the username from it
#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)

Answer 3

As of October 2019, The only way it is possible is to request for user_links in request and permissions
And then pass it in a scope, something like this
scope: ['user_link']