Accessing Facebook Profile URLs

The goal here, given a user facebook profile url, access and open the profile page. Some simple python code:

from urllib2 import urlopen
url = "http://www.facebook.com/username"
page = urlopen(url)

The problem is that for some "username" this causes HTTP ERROR 404. I noticed this e开发者_StackOverflowrror only happening when the path includes a name rather than the "profile.php?id=XXX" format.

Notice that we only have the url here and not the user id.

UPDATE: This turned out to happen also for some of the "profile.php?id=XXX" and other username formats.

This is a privacy feature of Facebook. Users have the ability to hide their profile page so that only logged in users can view their page. Accessing the page with /profile.php?id=XXX or with /username makes no difference. You must be logged-in in order to view the HTML page.

In your context, you'd have to first log in to a valid Facebook account before requesting the page and you should no longer receive the 404's.

One way to check this is on the graph API, graph.facebook.com/USERNAME will return a link property in the resulting JSON if they have a public page, and it will be omitted on private pages.

Not every Facebook account is accessible as FIRST.LAST, so you won't be able to reliably do this.

There is currently no guarantee that an account is accessible with a vanity name.

Works perfectly fine as long as the username exists.

Are you trying to open the page in a Web Browser or access the HTML source generated by the page?

If the latter, have you thought of using the Facebook Graph API to achieve whatever it is that you are doing? This will be much faster and the API is all documented. Plus the page's HTML source could change at any point in time, whereas the Graph API will not.

Edit

You could use the Graph API without having to even create an application to get the user ID, but going to http://graph.facebook.com/username and parsing the JSON response. You can then access the profile HTML using http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=userId