Mining Facebook Data Using R & Facebook API!

Folks,

In this blog we will learn the basics of extracting Facebook data using R & Facebook API.

Rfacebook Package: Provides an interface to the Facebook API.

Rfacebook package in R provides functions that allow R to access Facebook’s API to get information about posts, comments, likes, group that mention specific keywords & much more.

Install “Rfacebook” package from CRAN : install.packages(“Rfacebook”) 

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Step 1: Registering an Application with Facebook.

If you already have an account with Facebook, go to FacebookDeveloper and register.

Click “Register Now” button. After you register as a Facebook developer, you can register a new application.

Register a new application

From  FacebookDeveloper click on Apps at the top of the page to go to the application dashboard.

Click the button near the top. Once you are done with the verification process, your application is created. Note down the App Id & App Secret.

Application Dashboard

Site URL on Facebook App Settings: http://localhost:1410 

App Settings

Step 2: Create OAuth token to Facebook R session.

fbOAuth creates a long-lived OAuth access token that enables R to make authenticated calls to the Facebook API.

fbOAuth(app_id=””,app_secret=”YourAppSecret”)

Saving “my_oauth”as a file to be re-used in future sessions, which can be used as token in functions.

Now the connection is done with the Facebook API & R. So here we goes with some of the basic functions.

If you are getting below error while calling function, please go the bottom of this blog post for fix.

Error in callAPI(query, token) :
An active access token must be used to query information about the current user.

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function getLikes

getLikes(user, n = n , token): Extract list of liked pages of a Facebook user with page id.

Arguments: user: user name/ID , n: Number of liked pages to return for user.

Use below command in R to get likes.

Here is the my result data set “my_likes”. With three variables: Id, names & website of pages.

Pages Liked

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function getPage 

getPage(page , token, n = n): Extract list of posts from a public Facebook page.

Arguments: page: Page ID or page name, n : Number of posts to return for page.

Example: Extracting 10 posts of Facebook Page “Narendra Modi”. 

Facebook Page Id of this page you can get from this link: http://findmyfbid.com/ . See below the gif.

After getting the page id use below command in R to get posts.

Here is my result data set “getpagedata”. With 10 Observation & 10 Variables. Variables like Post with likes_count, share_count & comments_count etc.

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function search_groups

searchGroup(“text”,token, n = n): Find any group with its privacy status & Facebook ID.

Arguments: text: text string, n : Number of groups to return.

Use below command in R to search groups.

Here is my result data set “search_groups”. With many observation & 3 Variables.

Groups

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function getGroup

getGroup(ID, token, n = n): Extract list of posts from a public Facebook page. Whose privacy is open.

Arguments: ID: Group ID , n: Number of posts to return for group.

Example: We have to extract 10 posts from 7th group “Web Scraping and Data mining” present in above image groups.

Use below command in R to get groups.

Here is my result data set. With 10 Observation & 3 Variables.

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function searchPages

searchPages(, token, n = n): It Search pages that having a string/keyword.

Arguments: string: any string , n: Number of pages to return

Example: We have to search 10 pages that mention a string “Sports”.

Use below command in R to search pages.

Here is my result data set with 10 Observation & 16 Variables.

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function updateStatus

updateStatus(“text”, token)

Arguments: text: any string , token

Use below command in R to update Facebook status.

Result:

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Fix for Error in callAPI:

If you are getting below error, please follow below steps to fix this issue.

Error in callAPI(query, token) :
An active access token must be used to query information about the current user.

Run Below Function First :-

fbOAuth <- function(app_id, app_secret, extended_permissions=FALSE, legacy_permissions=FALSE, scope=NULL)
{
  ## getting callback URL
  full_url <- oauth_callback()
  full_url <- gsub("(.*localhost:[0-9]{1,5}/).*", x=full_url, replacement="\\1")
  message <- paste("Copy and paste into Site URL on Facebook App Settings:",
                   full_url, "\nWhen done, press any key to continue...")
  ## prompting user to introduce callback URL in app page
  invisible(readline(message))
  ## a simplified version of the example in httr package
  facebook <- oauth_endpoint(
    authorize = "https://www.facebook.com/dialog/oauth",
    access = "https://graph.facebook.com/oauth/access_token") 
  myapp <- oauth_app("facebook", app_id, app_secret)
  if (is.null(scope)) {
    if (extended_permissions==TRUE){
      scope <- c("user_birthday", "user_hometown", "user_location", "user_relationships",
                 "publish_actions","user_status","user_likes")
    }
    else { scope <- c("public_profile", "user_friends")}
  
    if (legacy_permissions==TRUE) {
      scope <- c(scope, "read_stream")
    }
  }

  if (packageVersion('httr') < "1.2"){
    stop("Rfacebook requires httr version 1.2.0 or greater")
  }

  ## with early httr versions
  if (packageVersion('httr') <= "0.2"){
    facebook_token <- oauth2.0_token(facebook, myapp,
                                     scope=scope)
    fb_oauth <- sign_oauth2.0(facebook_token$access_token)
    if (GET("https://graph.facebook.com/me", config=fb_oauth)$status==200){
      message("Authentication successful.")
    }
  }

  ## less early httr versions
  if (packageVersion('httr') > "0.2" & packageVersion('httr') <= "0.6.1"){
    fb_oauth <- oauth2.0_token(facebook, myapp,
                               scope=scope, cache=FALSE) 
    if (GET("https://graph.facebook.com/me", config(token=fb_oauth))$status==200){
      message("Authentication successful.")
    } 
  }

  ## httr version from 0.6 to 1.1
  if (packageVersion('httr') > "0.6.1" & packageVersion('httr') < "1.2"){
    Sys.setenv("HTTR_SERVER_PORT" = "1410/")
    fb_oauth <- oauth2.0_token(facebook, myapp,
                               scope=scope, cache=FALSE) 
    if (GET("https://graph.facebook.com/me", config(token=fb_oauth))$status==200){
      message("Authentication successful.")
    } 
  }

  ## httr version after 1.2
  if (packageVersion('httr') >= "1.2"){
    fb_oauth <- oauth2.0_token(facebook, myapp,
                               scope=scope, cache=FALSE) 
    if (GET("https://graph.facebook.com/me", config(token=fb_oauth))$status==200){
      message("Authentication successful.")
    } 
  }

  ## identifying API version of token
  error <- tryCatch(callAPI('https://graph.facebook.com/pablobarbera', fb_oauth),
                    error = function(e) e)
  if (inherits(error, 'error')){
    class(fb_oauth)[4] <- 'v2'
  }
  if (!inherits(error, 'error')){
    class(fb_oauth)[4] <- 'v1'
  }

  return(fb_oauth)
}

Fix Credit goes to (www.listendata.com/) Visit this link for more information.

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Thanks!

Happy Learning!

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