Python Facebook API - cursor pagination

Question

My question involves learning how to retrieve my entire list of friends using Facebook\'s Python API. The current result returns an object with limited number of friends

Answer 1

in this example you off set / pagination by one at the time, i think my while loop is simple since it only looking for the pagination key"next" to be none, if doesnt exists means we finish looping, and you will have your results in a list. in this example i am just looking for all the people call jacob

import requests
import facebook

token = access_token="your token goes here"
fb = facebook.GraphAPI(access_token=token)
limit = 1
offset = 0
data = {"q": "jacob",
        "type": "user",
        "fields": "id",
        "limit": limit,
        "offset": offset}
req = fb.request('/search', args=data, method='GET')

users = []
for item in req['data']:
    users.append(item["id"])

pag = req['paging']
while pag.get("next") is not None:
    offset += limit
    data["offset"] = offset
    req = fb.request('/search', args=data, method='GET')
    for item in req['data']:
        users.append(item["id"])
    pag = req.get('paging')
print users

Answer 2

Meanwhile I was searching answer here is much better approach:

import facebook
access_token = ""
graph = facebook.GraphAPI(access_token = access_token)

totalFriends = []
friends = graph.get_connections("me", "/friends&summary=1")

while 'paging' in friends:
    for i in friends['data']:
        totalFriends.append(i['id'])
    friends = graph.get_connections("me", "/friends&summary=1&after=" + friends['paging']['cursors']['after'])

At end point you will get one response where data will be empty and then there will be no 'paging' key so at that time it will break and all the data will be stored.

Answer 3

Sadly the documentation of pagination is an open issue since almost 2 years. You should be able to paginate like this (based on this example) using requests:

import facebook
import requests

ACCESS_TOKEN = "my_token"
graph = facebook.GraphAPI(ACCESS_TOKEN)
friends = graph.get_connections("me","friends")

allfriends = []

# Wrap this block in a while loop so we can keep paginating requests until
# finished.
while(True):
    try:
        for friend in friends['data']:
            allfriends.append(friend['name'].encode('utf-8'))
        # Attempt to make a request to the next page of data, if it exists.
        friends=requests.get(friends['paging']['next']).json()
    except KeyError:
        # When there are no more pages (['paging']['next']), break from the
        # loop and end the script.
        break
print allfriends

Update: There's a new generator method available which implements above behavior and can be used to iterate over all friends like this:

for friend in graph.get_all_connections("me", "friends"):
    # Do something with this friend.