Miscellaneous desk
< September 23	<< Aug \| September \| Oct >>	Current desk >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is a transcluded archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

September 24

Searching for short, available Instagram usernames

I am trying to find a username that is five or less characters long. Is there a tool out there that could give me an aggregated list of every one (if there are even any left)? Any comment would be greatly appreciated. WongSeo (talk to me!) 14:53, 24 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Are you trying to find a specific username that you vaguely remember and hope to find on a list of registered users, or are you trying to find a short username that has not yet an account? A list of registered short user names will be hopelessly long. If you allow characters from the CJK set (Wikipedia does; 安田紀子 is a registered username), there are more than 10²⁴ potential names, so you can be sure there are some left. --Lambiam 17:35, 24 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Rules for Instagram usernames allow a limit of up to 30 characters for your username. You can use letters, numbers, periods, and underscores, but no other special symbol. If this means 26+26+10+1+1 symbols from the 7-bit ASCII character set, there are ~~320~~ 1.074^E9 possible 5-character names of which several are objectionable. Typo corrected again. Philvoids (talk) 08:24, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Is that a typo? If there are 64 possible characters to use, then there are 64⁵ or slightly over one billion possible 5-character names. CodeTalker (talk) 14:50, 25 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your correction. Philvoids (talk) 12:11, 26 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You're welcome, but your correction is still not correct. 1.074⁹ is a little less than 2. I think you mean 1.074 x 10⁹. CodeTalker (talk) 16:33, 26 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Nolo contendere. But I doubt that any human will wade through such an aggregated list and think that the OP needs some kind of shorter filtered list. Philvoids (talk) 08:24, 1 October 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You could generate a list of valid 5-character usernames and then validate them against Instagram's API, but this may take you a few billion years due to rate-limiting. It would help to prioritize. Elizium23 (talk) 03:52, 29 September 2022 (UTC)[reply]