Grab Instagram Follower count

Question

So I have a question what would be the method to just grab the instagram follower count for a said user?

I have looked at two possible options the official instagram AP

Answer 1

You can request https://www.instagram.com/<username>/?__a=1 and receive JSON with account information also with followers count as well. It doesn't need authorization.

Answer 2

The link from the accepted answer (https://www.instagram.com/<username>/?__a=1) no longer seems to work, but we can still get followers count from parsing the html from the normal profile url https://www.instagram.com/<username>

If you do a GET request, you'll get the plain HTML and you can search an html tag that looks like <link rel="canonical" href="https://www.instagram.com/<username>/" /><meta content="359 Followers, 903 Following, 32 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from <username>)" name="description" />

You can try it out in your browser by going to an Instagram profile, then right click and viewing the page source. Then it's just a matter of parsing the text to get the info you want.

Here's an example to get the number of followers in javascript:

var url = "https://www.instagram.com/username";
request.get(url, function(err, response, body){
    if(response.body.indexOf(("meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"")) != -1){
        console.log("followers:", response.body.split("meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"")[1].split("Followers")[0])
    }
 });

This is probably not a reliable, future-proof approach, but it does seem to work for now.