Network Programming in .NET

If you want to convert a Facebook URL like http://www.facebook.com/LambOfficial into a profile id, “56062886901”, so that you can link to the page using the FB:// protocol, i.e. FB://profile/56062886901 – which looks better than a web link on iOS. Then the simple trick is to replace the “www” with “graph”, and then look for the id parameter.

To do this from code, then you would use something like this:

const string strFBRegex = @”id.:..(?<id>\d+).,”;
var strGraphUrl = strUrl.Replace(“www”, “graph”);
var wc = new System.Net.WebClient();
var strGraphJson = wc.DownloadString(strGraphUrl);
strId = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match(strGraphJson, strFBRegex).Groups[“id”].Value;

Where strUrl is the input url, and strID is the output.

However, this does not account for facebook pages that have the format http://www.facebook.com/pages/pagename/id, in which the profile id is visible in the url, but the graph page does not work.

So, something like this catches this case also:

var strId = “”;
if (!strUrl.ToLower().Contains(“/pages/”))
{
const string strFBRegex = @”id.:..(?<id>\d+).,”;
var strGraphUrl = strUrl.Replace(“www”, “graph”);
var wc = new System.Net.WebClient();
var strGraphJson = wc.DownloadString(strGraphUrl);
strId = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match(strGraphJson, strFBRegex).Groups[“id”].Value;
}
else
{
strId = System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex.Match(strUrl, @”\d+”).Value;
}
strFBUrl = “fb://profile/” + strId;