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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T12:34:45+00:00

I am using facepy facebook api to fetch messages from my facebook account. I

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I am using facepy facebook api to fetch messages from my facebook account. I have got myself long live access token with validity of 60days using the API. Now, in my program before querying for message I want to check wether my token has expired or not and if expired fetch a new one.

I am using get_extended_access_token which also returns a datetime instance describing when token expires. Now I think it is not a effecient way to use get_extended_access_token because everytime I am going to query for new message it will also fetch the access token(I know it is same as before) but I think this is a overhead.

So, I googled and found that we can also use 

https://graph.facebook.com/debug_token?input_token=INPUT_TOKEN&access_token=ACCESS_TOKEN

to debug the token

So I supplied my long live access token instead of INPUT_TOKEN and ACCESS_TOKEN and it gave me a json response:

{
   "data": {
      "app_id": XXXXX,
      "is_valid": true,
      "application": "YYYYY",
      "user_id": ZZZZZZ,
      "issued_at": 1349261684,
      "expires_at": 1354445684,
      "scopes": [
         "read_mailbox"
      ]
   }
}

Now if you look at expires_at field it is showing 1354445684 seconds and when I tried to convert it into days/months it gave me 15676 days and when I checked the same token in graph explorer using the debug option it showed

expires_at: 1354445684(about 2 months)

Now, what I don’t understand is how 1354445684 is equivalent to 2 months and how to achieve this in python.

Also comment on which is the better approach to check wether token has expired or not API or using the facebook url?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Now if you look at expires_at field it is showing 1354445684 seconds and when I tried to convert it into days/months it gave me 15676 days

    Then you’ve done (or understood) something wrong.

    expires_at 1354445684 is a Unix Timestamp, and equals Sun, 02 Dec 2012 10:54:44 +0000 translated into a human-readable date.

    And that is pretty much two month from the issued_at timestamp 1349261684, a.k.a. Wed, 03 Oct 2012 10:54:44 +0000

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