Instagram Helper (Scraper) Chrome Extension
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I've just published a new version 0.23 of extension on Chrome Web Store. So when you click the extension icon, the displayed popup window has two buttons: 1) Get Insta Users (manual fetching). The previous approach of getting the list that requires the manual fetching, this option will be removed soon. 2) Get Insta Users. The new approach that creates a list for the username specified in the input control. There are two options for autofetching 1) "Page size for fetching users" - amount of users to be returned in one click. The default value is 100, however debugging this functionality, I realised that instagram server doesn't respect this parameter too much, and usually returns about 20 users in one call. 2) "Interval between requests for fetching users, ms" - delay before issuing the next request when the processing of previous request is completed. If there is no delays, for fetching the long list of users, the instagram will start to return HTTP code 429 (too many requests, try several minutes later). Right now this situation is not handled, and the only option to avoid that is having a delay. I am eager to finish a new version which allows to get rid of manual fetching of following users/followers. However because of private businesses, it is not going to happen this weekend, and now is planned for the next weekend (March 11-12). In the meantime, I was able to send AJAX requests that fetches the followers list. It is a sad, but Instagram checks the Referer HTTP header, and doesn't return the data if Referer is not instagram - that is the case when I send the requests from the page generated by extension. I was tried to inject the code that sends requests into Instagram HTML page and it worked, however looked quite ugly and cumbersome. Therefore finally I decided to go with the option when this HTTP header is modified before sending the request using Chrome API, however it required to grant the additional permissions for the extension, and switch from "event page" to "background page" approach.
It cannot do a lot of things right now, actually the main function is creating a list of instagram users (usually a merged list of followers and following users) with some detailed information and exporting it into CSV file. However I have more things to do in my mind.
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