An answer to the 'how to get Facebook shares a

Question

I am building a website where I need to retrieve Facebook shares and likes of numerous links and URLs from different sites.

The problem is, for some URLs it is impossible to get what I wanted. For example, when I look for data about links that look like http://www.example.com/?a=1&b=2&c=3 all I get is wrong data about http://www.example.com/?a=1 and the rest of the URL (&b=2&c=3) is simply ignored by Facebook.

Here at StackOverflow, a lot of people are looking for an answer and many questions are simply unanswered. So, once I did it right, I'm back to tell how I did it.

P.S. : This works only for non-Facebook URLs. If you're looking for shares and likes counts of an internal Facebook link (image, video ...), this won't work for you. I'll be using PHP to answer the question.

Answer 1

To get likes and shares counts, I use FQL instead of the Graph API (even though I am actually using the Graph API to send the query).

But this is not enough : to be able to do so, I had call the rawurlencode() function on the URL I want to get data about. Otherwise, I'll keep getting errors.

So, this likes(), the function I am using to have the counts :

function likes($url) {
    $url = rawurlencode($url);
    $json_string = file_get_contents("http://graph.facebook.com/fql?format=json&q=SELECT%20share_count,%20like_count%20FROM%20link_stat%20WHERE%20url='$url'");
    $json = json_decode($json_string, true);
    if (key_exists("data", $json)) {
        if (is_array($json["data"])) {
            if (array_key_exists("0", $json["data"])) {
                return intval($json["data"]["0"]["share_count"]) + intval($json["data"]["0"]["like_count"]);
            } else {
                echo "Error : '0' is no key<br/>";
                return 0;
            }
        } else {
            echo "Error : data is no table <br/>";
            return 0;
        }
    } else {
        echo "Error : No data key <br/>";
        return 0;
    }
}

I hope this will help someone someday :)