Get favorited tags of user

Question

This was requested in 1 and declined because of a missing authentication method.

Now that authentication is in place, is there a way to retrieve the favorited tags of a user (myself)?

Answer 1

UPDATE: The feature appears to be present in the, so far, undocumented API version 2.3. See captncraig's answer on this page.

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After all these years, it looks like this might never get implemented. However, it's not too hard to get the information via page scraping.

1. From a browser or scraper that is logged in as the user, fetch the site's question page. (EG: http://stackapps.com/questions)

2. Parse the #interestingTags > a.post-tag nodes.

For example, this javascript will work in the browser console while logged in to and browsing any Stack Exchange page:

var favTagNodes = $('<div><a class="post-tag">** Error loading favorite tags. **</a></div>') 
.load ("/questions #interestingTags>a.post-tag", function (response, status, xhr) {
    var favoriteTags    = favTagNodes.find ("a.post-tag").map ( function () {
        return this.textContent;
    } )
    .get ();

    console.log ("favoriteTags: ", favoriteTags);
} );

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1. It can be made into a bookmarklet, or userscript, or browser extension.

2. It even works cross-domain when using GM_xmlhttpRequest and a full URL.

3. Be sure to cache the results for at least an hour to avoid excessive scrapes of the page and possible banning. See also: Etiquette of Screen-scraping Stack Overflow?.

Answer 2

Good news! The (yet undocumented) api version 2.3 has this feature.

https://api.stackexchange.com/2.3/users/{id}/tag-preferences?access_token=...&key=...&site=StackOverflow.com will give you something like:

{
  "items": [
    {
      "tag_preference_type": "favorite_tag",
      "user_id": 9999999,
      "tag_name": "git"
    }, {
      "tag_preference_type": "favorite_tag",
      "user_id": 9999999,
      "tag_name": "go"
    }, {
      "tag_preference_type": "ignored_tag",
      "user_id": 9999999,
      "tag_name": "java"
    }
    ... 
  ],
  "has_more": false,
  "quota_max": 10000,
  "quota_remaining": 9997
}