Is there a way to insert an @mention into a Facebook status update posted with pyfacebook?

Question

I have some code like the following in my application:

message = \"Hi, @John Doe!\"
postID = fb.stream.publish(
    message = loader.render_to_string(\'wall_         


        

Answer 1

AFAIK facebook's API does not allow this. The only approach that I know of at the moment would be to write a screen scraper to do these posts using the format described by tam7t's answer. If you use the mobile version of facebook's site (m.facebook.com) it makes it much easier.

NOTE: This might be a violation of Facebook's Application TOS.

Edit: Here is some ruby code that will do the trick, using the Mechanize Gem

require 'mechanize'

agent = Mechanize.new
agent.user_agent_alias = 'Mac Safari'

page = agent.get('http://m.facebook.com')
form = page.forms.first
# enter credentials
form.pass = 'user password'
form.email = 'user@example.com'
page = agent.submit form

# go straight to page to post on 
page = agent.get("http://m.facebook.com/wall.php?id=PAGE_ID_NUM")
form = page.forms.first
form.message = "@[139730900025:PhotoGrabber] is awesome"
page = agent.submit form

NOTE: Obviously (as tiagoboldt kindly pointed out) it would be wrong to store / utilise the credentials of other people in your application. This approach would only be appropriate for making posts from a facebook account that you controlled.

That said, back to the original question of putting an @mention in a wall post, I have noticed that whilst the post and @mention go up on the wall fine, this method does not propagate the post to the mentioned user/page's wall. Not sure if that is important to you.