Facebook ID from URL

Question

Given a facebook url such as http://facebook.com/cnn, is there any way to get the ID of that page short of scraping it?

Answer 1

It is better (and legal) to do this with graph API. Just perform API request to https://graph.facebook.com/cnn and get id from the response.

Here is the response for cnn:

{
   "id": "5550296508",
   "name": "CNN",
   "picture": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs178.ash2/41813_5550296508_728_s.jpg",
   "link": "http://www.facebook.com/cnn",
   "category": "Company",
   "website": "www.cnn.com\nwww.ireport.com\n",
   "username": "cnn",
   "company_overview": "TRIVIA FROM THE CNN TOUR...",
   "products": "CNN US...",
   "likes": 1689936
}

Answer 2

Facebook's own Graph API supports it. From the documentation:

The "ids" query parameter also accepts URLs. This is useful for finding IDs of URLs in the Open Graph. For example: https://graph.facebook.com/?ids=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/