How to scrape instagram account info in python

Question

I am trying to do something extremely simple in python yet somehow it's very difficult. All I want to do is write a python script that records the number of people a Instagram user is following, and the number of it's followers. That's it.

Can anyone point me to a good package to do this? preferably not beautiful soup as that is overly complicated for what I want to do. I just want something like

[user: example_user, followers:9019, following:217] 

Is there an Instagram specific python library?

The account I want to scrape is public. This is very simple to do for twitter.

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

As the content you look for are available in page source, you can fetch them using requests in combination with BeautifulSoup.

Give it a try:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = requests.get('https://www.instagram.com/michaeljackson/')
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text, 'lxml')
item = soup.select_one("meta[property='og:description']")
name = item.find_previous_sibling().get("content").split("•")[0]
followers = item.get("content").split(",")[0]
following = item.get("content").split(",")[1].strip()
print(f'{name}\n{followers}\n{following}')

Results:

Name :Michael Jackson
Followers :1.6m
Following :4

Answer 2

I don't know why you would like to avoid using BeautifulSoup, since it is actually quite convinient for tasks like this. So, something along the following lines should do the job:

import requests
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

html = requests.get('https://www.instagram.com/cristiano/') # input URL here
soup = BeautifulSoup(html.text, 'lxml')

data = soup.find_all('meta', attrs={'property':'og:description'})
text = data[0].get('content').split()

user = '%s %s %s' % (text[-3], text[-2], text[-1])
followers = text[0]
following = text[2]

print('User:', user)
print('Followers:', followers)
print('Following:', following)

...output:

User: Cristiano Ronaldo (@cristiano)

Followers: 111.5m

Following: 387

Of course, you would need to do some calculations to get an actual (yet truncated) number in cases where the user has more than 1m followers (or is following more than 1m users), which should not be too difficult.