WarcraftUpdate.net got all of its server status information from a publicly accessible XML file. Every realm, status type and load was easily accessible with and easy to parse document.
This past weekend that all changed with the launch of the new World of Warcraft website.
With the change of the website comes a change of the way things work. One particular change was this publicly accessible XML document: It’s gone.
So naturally I whipped up some code to scrape the page for all the data WarcraftUpdate requires. First the HTML page is downloaded and fed into an XML parser; Good thing Blizzard wrote compliant XHTML. Next I xpath my way to the correct div containing all the realms’ data then create an array of each element that has what I want. From here you just do another xpath to fetch the specific data, create the old standard XML tree and there you have it.
It’s good to note that there seems to be a new queue field. Right now it’s blank so I have no idea what data will populate it. Maybe queue times? This might mean a new WarcraftUpdate feature in the near future!
Need some XML datas? Send me an email on my contact form and I’ll get you a link to my parsed files.
