Experimenting with WoW data - Part 1

I will now delve into real data and the dataset I have chosen is the auction data for World of Warcraft. Each realm has its own auction house, and I will start with the auction house of a single realm. There are more than two hundred realms in NA region alone. There are three more regions, Europe, Asia-Pacific and China. 

 To fetch the data, one will need an API key, which can be easily obtained by registering on Blizzard Dev. Below is the simple code to get the data and print it. Please note that this API returns the metadata, the response contains the location for complete auction data, which has to be fetched next. This response also contains the last modified time which can be persisted so that it can be used to find when the auction data dump has been updated.
Auction metadata
The data dump takes quite a while to retrieve (few minutes on my broadband connection), so it would be nice to add a progress status message. Below is a nice utility function to do that. The print command is provided with the 'end' parameter of '\r' instead of default newline ('\n') which makes it start from the beginning of the same line.
Next I will try to analyse the auction data using Spark and associated libraries.

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