From Facebook Developer Wiki

Does this really work? I have not gotten it to work and there are more people in the forum http://forum.developers.facebook.com/viewtopic.php?id=5607 that it not working for. I've tested with the simplest FQL-query just to make sure that it not them and as pattern I use .* which my guess would match everything?

This page says that pattern is a regular expression, however the examples suggest that it is in fact a glob. Can someone clarify this?

Answer to the question on whether the pattern is indeed a regular expression: I have confirmed it is a regular expression and not a glob. Here is something close to a regular expression I am using, where it will match any page that contains page1 or page5 or the main landing canvas page (e.g. http://apps.facebook.com/afunapp/) if the app's name is afunapp:

 'pattern' => '(page1|page5|afunapp\\/$)'

.* is a proper regular expression.

Is there a way to get the json return as an assocciative array (Object with Properties) instead of an indexed array?

I can't make any sense out of this wiki article. If someone could just explain how I can use this to avoid getting a full list of fb_sig_users that would be AMAZING.

[edit] Preload FQL does not load for users with a lot of friends

"Preload FQL is only run for users with fewer than 2500 friends to avoid out of memory errors." is the error message, it comes through on the fb_sig_preload_fql_error and gives you the classic style list of friends.