Question

I am trying to extract the facebook id from an iframe in order to update a module which will display on the user’s website and link to the fb page.

For example, when I load this iframe:

<iframe src=https://graph.facebook.com/zuck></iframe>

You can see that Mark Zuckerberg has the id of 4. I would simply like to pull this value out of the iframe and assign it to a variable via php. Any ideas on how this can be done?

Answer 1

You can do this pretty easily using the FB javascript API.

In your head, add a JS block with:

window.fbAsyncInit = function() {
    FB.api("/zuck", function(response){
        alert(response.id);
    });
};​

… replace zuck with the wanted username, eg. “/” + USERNAME

Async load the FB JS …

<script type="text/javascript">
// Load the SDK Asynchronously
(function(d){
    var js, id = 'facebook-jssdk', ref = d.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];
    if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;}
    js = d.createElement('script'); js.id = id; js.async = true;
    js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/all.js";
    ref.parentNode.insertBefore(js, ref);
}(document));
</script>​

Since ID is a public field, you don’t need any extra user login stuff; you can just make a call.

Please note … that is MISSING some usual FB stuff:
FB.init – since we don’t need to do any user session related stuff.
[div id=”fb-root”][/div] – since we aren’t showing any stuff from FB; dialogs, etc. (but with square brackets! 😛 )