How to Call character info for web developers?

[alexi14]

Hi,

I'm working on a website for my LS, and I'd like to be able to call character info. I don't see any XML pages to call from, or really anything. I know a lot of sites are doing it such as ffxivpro, but I don't see any documentation anywhere.

Can anyone help please?

Thanks,

Astin

[alexi14]

bump,,,,,,,,,,,

[Aleczan]

Hope a dev or some other fan site developer would answer this. My enjin's signature is broken, would be great to get one of my own hosted on my server.

[Coldfire]

It's most likely done by analyzing the HTML-code for each characters lodestone site. You basically search the code for certain words or tags and then read the information from there. Is pretty simple but if SE changes the layout you have to update your method. Usually this is done at certain time intervals and not every time the site is loaded (so you don't get into trouble with SE :P )

[alexi14]

So scraping?

[Coldfire]

Web scraping, yes. For example you search for "Shield" and the next number between bold-tags is the shield level.

[Lebannen]

would be cool if we get a service like the one you mentioned.

[Coldfire]

Had some free time and put together some code to fetch the data http://pastebin.com/6y7VtjDu
It's written in ASP.NET and not very pretty :P
As usual with stuff like this I'm not responsible if it blows up your server, but you are free to use, alter and distribute it.

[alexi14]

I know like 0 c# though. Is it possible to give me an example in PHP? I can get the scraping part myself, but I don't understand how to go from a Character Name and server to a ID number that the website uses.

[Coldfire]

You will have to use the lodestone character search for that. The ID is in the link to the character's subpages. I think sites like ffxivpro just scan through all the numbers to get all character data. But if you only need it for a small group of people or even just for yourself you can use the lodestone search and copy the IDs from there. Beware though that if you are logged in there will be no ID for your own page shown in the address.