Get user's name from Facebook Graph API

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

Answer 1

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 2

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 3

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 4

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 5

For facebook data you can use json_decode.

For another sites try with webscraping, for example: here