Get user's name from Facebook Graph API - php

Question

I would like to know how is it possible to retrieve a string from an external page.
For example: In a PHP website, the user sends a facebook id, ex: 1157251270
And the website returns the name from http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270.
I hope I made it clear.
Thank you

Answer 1

The Graph API returns JSON strings, so you can use:
echo json_decode(file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270'))->name;
or more verbose:
$pageContent = file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270');
$parsedJson = json_decode($pageContent);
echo $parsedJson->name; // Romanos Fessas
See json_decode — Decodes a JSON string

Answer 2

If you are using Facebook's PHP SDK, you can also do this to query their graph API:
$fb = new Facebook();
$object = $fb->api('/1157251270');

Answer 3

you get it by:
$link = json_decode(file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270'));
echo $link->name;
Nice tut:
http://webhole.net/2009/08/31/how-to-read-json-data-with-php/

Answer 4

Either you use :
$res_json = file_gets_contents("http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270")
$res = json_decode($res_json)
Or, if you prefer curl (here with https and access token) :
$ch4 = curl_init();
curl_setopt($ch4, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER,1);
curl_setopt($ch4, CURLOPT_URL, "https://graph.facebook.com/1157251270?access_token=YOUR_ACCESS_TOKEN");
curl_setopt($ch4, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, false);
if(!$result = curl_exec($ch4))
{
echo curl_error($ch4);
} else {
$res = json_decode($res_json)
}
curl_close($ch4);

Answer 5

For facebook data you can use json_decode.
For another sites try with webscraping, for example:
here