Facebook profile URL regular expression

Question

Given the following Facebook profile and page URLs, my intent is to extract profile ids or usernames into the first match position.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=123456789   http://www.facebook.com/someusername   www.facebook.com/pages/Regular-Expressions/207279373093   

The regex I have so far looks like this:

(?:http:\/\/)?(?:www.)?facebook.com\/(?:(?:\w)*#!\/)?(?:pages\/)?(?:[?\w\-]*\/)?(?:profile.php\?id=(\d.*))?([\w\-]*)? 

Which produces the following results:

Result 1:

1. 123456789
2.  

Result 2:

1.  
2. someusername

Result 3:

1.  
2. 207279373093

The ideal outcome would look like:

Result 1:

1. 123456789

Result 2:

1. someusername

Result 3:

1. 207279373093

That is to say, I'd like to have the profile identifier to always be returned in the first position.

It would also be ideal of www.facebook.com/ and facebook.com/ didn't match either.

Answer 1

I'd recommend Rad Software Regular Expression Designer.

Also this online tool is great https://regex101.com/ ( though most people prefer http://regexr.com/ )

(?:(?:http|https):\/\/)?(?:www.)?facebook.com\/(?:(?:\w)*#!\/)?(?:pages\/)?(?:[?\w\-]*\/)?(?:profile.php\?id=(?=\d.*))?([\w\-]*)? 

Answer 2

I made a gist a while back that works fine against the given examples:

# Matches patterns such as: #    http://www.facebook.com/my_page_id => my_page_id #    http://www.facebook.com/#!/my_page_id => my_page_id #    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Paris-France/Vanity-Url/123456?v=app_555 => 45678 #    http://www.facebook.com/pages/Vanity-Url/45678 => 45678 #    http://www.facebook.com/#!/page_with_1_number => page_with_1_number #    http://www.facebook.com/bounce_page#!/pages/Vanity-Url/45678 => 45678 #    http://www.facebook.com/bounce_page#!/my_page_id?v=app_166292090072334 => my_page_id  /(?:http:\/\/)?(?:www\.)?facebook\.com\/(?:(?:\w)*#!\/)?(?:pages\/)?(?:[\w\-]*\/)*([\w\-]*)/ 

To get the latest version: https://gist.github.com/733592