Get user's name from Facebook Graph API

Question

I would like to know how is it possible to retrieve a string from an external page.

For example: In a PHP website, the user sends a facebook id, ex: 1157251270

Answer 1

The Graph API returns JSON strings, so you can use:

echo json_decode(file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270'))->name;

or more verbose:

$pageContent = file_get_contents('http://graph.facebook.com/1157251270');
$parsedJson  = json_decode($pageContent);
echo $parsedJson->name; // Romanos Fessas

See json_decode — Decodes a JSON string