Are Facebook Names Publicly Accesible Using Facebook API - php

Question

Are the names of profiles on Facebook publicly accessible, as if I would NOT need to log into Facebook to access them?
I am intending to store a large amount of names as a small piece of a larger project. I feel as if scraping Facebook for names would be a relatively simple task using the Facebook Graph API, but I am a little confused.
I found another tutorial online at http://jilltxt.net/?p=2810 which described an easy way of finding any Facebook profile picture using one simple line:
https://graph.facebook.com/USER-ID/picture?type=large
This was very helpful because I am able to use a range of ID numbers and a small amount of PHP to gather large amounts of profile pictures as seen on my test page here: http://www.joshiefishbein.com/fi/photobook.php
But what I am unfamiliar with is how I go from collecting pictures to names in this one simple line. Is it possible? Is there another (better) way?
Here's the code I am working with. The range of ID's are just an example.
function gen_pix($min, $max, $quantity) {
$numbers = range($min, $max);
shuffle($numbers);
$x_arr = array_slice($numbers, 0, $quantity);
foreach ($x_arr as $key => $value) {
$username = "https://graph.facebook.com/" . $value . "/";
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($username), true);
echo $json["name"];
}
}
$x = 337800042;
$y = 337800382;
$z = 1;
gen_pix($x,$y,$z);
I've gotten a little farther with this code, I can echo $username and I get the URL that I am looking for (for example https://graph.facebook.com/337800382/) but I do not get anything after that. json_decode isn't working seemingly.

Answer 1

In the same way you are pulling the profile picture, you can get the basic information of a user with their ID.
This page provides a list of data that is always publicly accessible.
So you need to make a GET request to pull back the JSON, like so...
https://graph.facebook.com/{user-id}/
For example https://graph.facebook.com/586207189/ pulls back my basic information. So your PHP would look like this
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents("https://graph.facebook.com/$user_id/"), true);
echo $json["name"];
PHP fiddle here
Update: Based on the code above, it's worth adding an IF to catch invalid Facebook IDs. Facebook IDs may not be sequential so not every one will return a name or image.
Updated code:
<?php
function gen_pix($min, $max, $quantity) {
$numbers = range($min, $max);
shuffle($numbers);
$x_arr = array_slice($numbers, 0, $quantity);
foreach ($x_arr as $key => $value) {
$username = "https://graph.facebook.com/" . $value . "/";
$json = json_decode(file_get_contents($username), true);
if (!isset($json['name'])) {
echo "Invalid ID<br />";
}
else {
echo $json["name"]. '<br />';
}
}
}
$x = 337800042;
$y = 337800382;
$z = 50;
gen_pix($x,$y,$z);
?>
PHP Fiddle here
It's also worth noting that pulling that much data from the graph is going to take a while. Have a look at doing batch requests to speed things up a bit. More info here