how to fetch the new achievements xml

A quick post for any other dataminers who want to look at the new achievements/character-stats XML from the US armoury.

As an example, let’s assume a toon called “toon” on realm “realm”.

There are two new character pages which you fetch in the normal way:
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-statistics.xml?r=realm&n=toon
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-achievements.xml?r=realm&n=toon

When you get each page, you find that it is a sort of stub, which just gives achievement categories and not much detailed data. I can’t show the XML because wordpress doesn’t like the angle brackets, but basically you get something like this:

rootCategories
category id="130" name="Character"
category id="141" name="Combat"
category id="128" name="Kills"
etc...


To get the detailed data, just attach each category ID to the main URL (with a “&c=”) and ask for the page again. Do this for every category ID on the page.

The three categories above are from the stats page. The URLs to get that data look like this:

http://www.wowarmory.com/character-statistics.xml?r=realm&n=toon&c=130
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-statistics.xml?r=realm&n=toon&c=141
http://www.wowarmory.com/character-statistics.xml?r=realm&n=toon&c=128

The real armoury page is doing async ajax-like calls back to the server when you expand a category tab on either page. Behind the scenes, the page is just forming up these sorts of URLs.