Use a web crawler to get data from a Facebook page

Question

I'm a little bit lost for the moment trying to write my thesis.

I need to collect data from a facebook page, for later use them for network analysis.

I need to collect for each message posted:

• ID of the message posted
• Content
• Type (picture, link, text or game)
• ID and name of the person who has posted the message
• Date of the creation of the message
• If it is case, dates of the possible updates
• Number of likes
• Names and IDs of the likers
• Number of shares
• Names and IDs of the sharers
• Number of comments
• Name and ID of the commentator + content of the comment
• Number of page likers at each moment (before each message posted)

Being not from the IT sector, i've got lots of difficulties. What's the easiest way to collect such data?

Moreover, do you think that it's legal to try to get data on public facebook pages?

Answer 1

Use Facebook Graph API. A few lines of simple Java program or perl script will suffice. You will need valid Auth Tokens.