Given a facebook url such as http://facebook.com/cnn, is there any way to get the ID of that page short of scraping it?
It is better (and legal) to do this with graph API. Just perform API request to https://graph.facebook.com/cnn
and get id from the response.
Here is the response for cnn
:
{
"id": "5550296508",
"name": "CNN",
"picture": "http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-snc4/hs178.ash2/41813_5550296508_728_s.jpg",
"link": "http://www.facebook.com/cnn",
"category": "Company",
"website": "www.cnn.com\nwww.ireport.com\n",
"username": "cnn",
"company_overview": "TRIVIA FROM THE CNN TOUR...",
"products": "CNN US...",
"likes": 1689936
}