Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2022 September 24

= 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)


 * 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)
 * 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 1.074E9 possible 5-character names of which several are objectionable. Typo corrected again. Philvoids (talk) 08:24, 1 October 2022 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * Thank you for your correction. Philvoids (talk) 12:11, 26 September 2022 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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)
 * 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)