Instagram API error - api

Question

I using Instagram API to get user info
api = InstagramAPI(access_token=access_token)
profile = api.user(user_id="kallaucyahoocojp") # I try to put output data to profile variable here
And I get the below error:
DownloadError: Unable to fetch URL: https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/kallaucyahoocojp.json?access_token=(u'1191812153.f78cd79.d2d99595c79d4c23a7994d85ea0d412c', {u'username': u'kallaucyahoocojp', u'bio': u'\u30c4\u30a4\u30c3\u30bf\u30d5\u30a9\u30ed\u30ef\u30fc\u5897\u52a0\u30b5\u30fc\u30d3\u30b9', u'website': u'http://twitter\u30d5\u30a9\u30ed\u30ef\u30fc.jp', u'profile_picture': u'http://images.ak.instagram.com/profiles/anonymousUser.jpg', u'full_name': u'Kallauc', u'id': u'1191812153'})
Can anybody help me to fix it?

Answer 1

You need to pass the numeric-based user id, rather than the username. For example, instead of passing kallaucyahoocojp, you might pass 1234 if t
Here's how to get the ID if you don't have it:
Search for the instagram user id using this endpoint. In the python api:
api.user_search(q="kallaucyahoocojp", count=100)
Check the results for an exact string match on each user name while iterating through the results (calling .lower() to be sure to ignore potential case issues).
If you don't find the user in the first page of results, call to the next page using the max id returned.
Get the user id object from the returned from the matching users search result, then call your original function again with the numeric id.
A couple of very important notes:
Notice that I called the search function for users with a count of 100. You can pick any number, but contrary to other SO posts, the first user is not always the user you want in a search. The search can and will match partials, and not always according to an exact match first. How do I know? I have production instagram apps. I will qualify and say that usually the results are in the first 2-3 matches. Decide what is cheaper; repeated API calls that bring you closer to the limit, or 1 large bulk call where you are certain to get all the results.
The python Instagram API last I checked does a terrible job returning paging information. You actually get the paging URL which defeats the purpose of the python API itself to get additional pages. Your options are extract the next id parameter from the URL using urlparse or something similar, or fix the API to return the paging data as an object per the json (I've done both). What happens is the API itself is discarding part of the json and only giving you the URL which normally you don't want/need.
In your example, here's the search response:
{
"meta": {
"code": 200
},
"data": [
{
"username": "kallaucyahoocojp",
"bio": "ツイッタフォロワー増加サービス",
"website": "http://twitterフォロワー.jp",
"profile_picture": "http://images.ak.instagram.com/profiles/anonymousUser.jpg",
"full_name": "Kallauc",
"id": "1191812153"
}
]
}
Revising your call:
api = InstagramAPI(access_token=access_token)
profile = api.user(user_id="1191812153")
I should note that you may not need to call the user call if you did a search because you may simply have all the info you need. It will depend on what you are doing of course, so I am giving you the general method to use the rest of the user api.

Answer 2

For extracting profile info using Instagram API, userid is required.
The endpoint for extracting userID:
https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/search?q=[username]&access_token=[HERE]
The endpoint for extracting profile info:
https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/[userid]/?access_token=[HERE]
Note that before extracting information, check the login permissions for your access token.