facebook fan page user data extraction php - php

Question

To extract list of users of a particular facebook fan page am using the below code
$text = file_get_contents('rawnike.php');
// $text = file_get_contents('http://www.facebook.com/plugins/fan.php?connections=10000&id=15087023444');
$text = preg_replace("/<script[^>]+\>/i", "", $text);
$text = preg_replace("/<img[^>]+\>/i", "", $text);
$pattern = '!(https?://[^\s]+)!'; // refine this for better/more specific results
if (preg_match_all($pattern, $text, $matches)) {
list(, $links) = ($matches);
//print_r($links);
//var_dump($links);
}
unset($links[0]);unset($links[1]);unset($links[2]);unset($links[3]);unset($links[4]);unset($links[5]);unset($links[6]);unset($links[7]);
//var_dump($links);
$links=str_replace('https','http',$links); $links=str_replace('\"','',$links);
foreach ($links as $value) {
echo "fb user ID: $value<br />\n";
}
And by this am successfully retrieving users' profile links using file_get_contents('rawnike.php') (rawnike.php locally saved)
but if I try to pull the same from url file_get_contents("http://www.facebook.com/plugins/fan.php?connections=10000&id=15087023444") am not able to retrieve, which means I cannot extract facebook page's source directly! I should save the page's source manually!
The same I observed when parsing a user's page if I manually stores page's source code locally and parse it, am able to extract user's interest. On the other hand if I directly try to extract source code with URL, its not getting the same source.
Which means $source=file_get_contents($url); $source="content which displays ur browser doesnt supported or some crap" on other hand $source=file_get_contents($string_to_extract_content_of_local_saved_sourceFile); $source="content which i excatly needed to parse"
On doing little research I understood that FQL is right approach for doing things like this. But pls help me understand why there is difference in sources code extracted and is FQL is the only way or in some other way I can proceed ahead.

Answer 1

But pls help me understand why there is difference in sources code extracted
Because Facebook realizes by looking at the details of your HTTP request, stuff like the User Agent header etc., that it’s not a real browser used by an actual person making the request – and so they try to block you from accessing the data.
One can try to work around this, by providing request details that make it look more like a “real” browser – but scraping HTML pages to get the desired info is generally not the way to go, because –
and is FQL is the only way or in some other way I can proceed ahead.
– that’s what APIs are for. FQL/the Graph API are the means that Facebook provides for you to access their data.
If there is data you are interested in, that is not provided by those – then Facebook does not really want to give you that data. The data about persons who like a page is such kind of data.

Answer 2

<?php
$curl = curl_init("https://www.facebook.com/plugins/fan.php?connections=10000&id=15087023444");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, 1);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:15.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/15.0.1");
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, 0);
curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 0);
$data = curl_exec($curl);
curl_close($curl);
$data = preg_replace("%(.*?)(<div id.*?>)%is","",$data); //to strip <scripts>,<links>,<meta>,etc tags.
But the max connections are 100. :S

Answer 3

The number of connection params cannot exceed 100, you are trying with 1000.