facebook userid from username in excel power query - powerquery

Question

I have been spending time on excel power query in the past two days but did not figure out how to fetch facebook userid if i have the username.
For instance, if I have the username zuck OR
the profile url https://www.facebook.com/zuck
using any of the above, is it possible to find the uid (facebook numeric id). In this example, the ID is 4
Somewhat similar to what http://findmyfbid.com does, I want to find out if it is possible with excel power query.
Thanks

Answer 1

Looking around the Power Query Facebook connector and the Facebook Graph API reference I can't find any obvious way to look up user id's from the username.
http://findmyfbid.com/failure indicates that a search engine had to index the public usernames in order to find the id. You can open a page like https://www.facebook.com/Code.org/ in your browser and muck through the HTML and find the username yourself, assuming the page is still public.
On the other hand, findmyfbid.com has already solved this problem. Here's how to query against their website directly using a custom Power Query function FindId:
let
// Assume you've already URL-encoded the id
FindId = (id as text) as text =>
let
Source = Web.Contents("http://findmyfbid.com/", [
Content = Text.ToBinary("url=" & id),
Headers = [#"Content-Type"= "application/x-www-form-urlencoded"]
]),
// Web.Page can't POST directly, so force Web.Contents to execute the POST
WebPage = Web.Page(Binary.Buffer(Source)),
// Hopefully findmyfbid.com doesn't change their HTML layout
DrillDown = WebPage[Data]{0}
{[Name="HTML"]}[Children]
{[Name="BODY"]}[Children]
{[Name="DIV"]}[Children]
{[Name="DIV"]}[Children]
{[Name="CODE"]}[Children]
{[Kind="Text"]}[Text]
in
DrillDown,
ExampleCodeOrg = FindId("code.org")
in
ExampleCodeOrg
And you find that Code.org has an Id of 309754825787494.