Instagram API request single username - url

Question

I'm using this way to get the username data from Instagram:
https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/search?q=[USERNAME]&client_id=[CLIENT ID]
It works fine, but has a flaw - the username search actually gets ALL usernames starting with the string you set.
Why/How is that happening ?
There is a limit of 52 username results, so is there a way to increase it, because if you search "asdasd" (which is an existing account!) you would get probably a million accounts ?
Is there a work-around, because I want to search for the exact username ?

Answer 1

So it seems there is only this API for this functionality. You can simply use this workaround: make your request as you are doing it right now, then you can filter out the single item you need. You can iterate through the list of users, and only keep the one, where the username is exactly the same as you have specified.

Answer 2

SOLUTION:
Put the username in quotations like this (username: asdasdasd):
https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/search?q="asdasdasd"&client_id=[CLIENT ID]
Which results in (the results that interests you is highlighted):
- if you don't use the quotations there's a big chance that the desired username won't appear in the results!
If there are more than one results use this code the iterate through the response data to find your one and get it's ID, full_name etc.
function getUserID() {
//send request for the user info on click
$('.btn-user-request').click(function(){
var searchTerm = $('.input-user-request').val();
if(searchTerm == ''){
$('.user-id-value').html('Enter a username!');
}
else{
$.ajax({
url: "https://api.instagram.com/v1/users/search?q=\"" + searchTerm + "\"&client_id=5fc90c90b885487485125d6df440fefd",
dataType: 'jsonp'
}).done(function(data) {
if(data.data[0] == []){
$('.user-id-value').html('No username found!');
}
else{
for(i=0;i<data.data.length;i++){
var userInformation = data.data[i];
if(userInformation.username == searchTerm){
$('.user-id-value').html(userInformation.id);
break;
}
}
}
});
}
});
//simulate the button click, on click of the Enter key
$(".input-user-request").on('keydown', function(){
if(event.keyCode == 13){
$(".btn-user-request").click();
}
});
}
See JSFiddle
(for some reason the code doesn't format properly)

Answer 3

I would suggest to try username "jack".
In fact none of suggested methods work for this.
I tried with max_id, min_id, it does not work either.
So it is exact flaw in API, and there is no such documentation on Instagram API to help to solve this.
So finding exact user id by it's username is quite a problem for popular names.
The only one solution for today I found is parsing user's Instagram HTML page and get it's id from there. This is very stupid, but this is only one solution which works in all cases right now :(

Answer 4

It's simple:
https://www.instagram.com/{username}/?__a=1