[Geowanking] Perl Geospatial Content (and other gems?)

[Andy Armstrong]

On 30 Aug 2006, at 23:44, Rich Gibson wrote:
> How effective is the existing Geo::Gpx?  It is nice to have pure-perl,
> but the GPX parser in gpsbabel is quite fast, so if you were into
> wrapping gpsbabel anyway that seems a good path.

The existing Geo::Gpx doesn't do that much - all it can do is output  
an array of waypoints as GPX. It doesn't handle routes and tracks and  
it doesn't parse at all.

I've written a pure perl GPX parser / generator which can be used  
standalone. It's also the basis of the interface to gpsbabel. Behind  
the scenes importing, say, an NMEA log is implemented as

	NMEA -> gpsbabel -> GPX -> Perl GPX parser -> perl data structure

I've been doing some work on gpsbabel too - and eventually I plan to  
add a format to gpsbabel which is GPX + any useful internal data  
gpsbabel has (call this format BabelBabble or somesuch :)

So then you'll be able to do

	Some file format -> gpsbabel -> BabelBabble -> Perl parser -> perl  
data structure

and back

	perl data structure -> generate BabelBabbel -> gpsbabel -> Some file  
format

But the basic GPX functionality is pure perl and independent of  
gpsbabel.

-- 
Andy Armstrong, hexten.net