GPS Tools

This repository contains a collection of command line tools for working with GPS data. Currently, this project consists of the following tools:

• csv2gpx: Allows you to convert a CSV file containing GPS data into a GPX file.
• gpx2csv: Allows you to convert a GPX file into a CSV file containing the GPS data.

Installation

Install the project locally with:

python3 -m pip install .

This installs the csv2gpx and gpx2csv console scripts.

csv2gpx

csv2gpx is a simple command line utility that allows you to take a CSV file containing GPS data and convert it into a GPX file.

Command Line Options

• --input, -i: Required. The path to the input CSV file.
• --output, -o: Required. The path to the output GPX file that will be created.
• --format, -f: Allows you to specify a custom column mapping to use when parsing the CSV file. See the CSV Column Mapping section for more information.
• --skip, -s: Tells the software to ignore the first line of the CSV file. This is useful for ignoring a header row that may be present in the CSV file.
• --verbose, -v: Enables verbose output for the program.
• --force: Overwrites the output file if it already exists.

gpx2csv

gpx2csv is a simple command line utility that allows you to take a GPX file containing GPS waypoints and convert it into a CSV file containing the GPS data.

Command Line Options

• --input, -i: Required. The path to the input GPX file.
• --output, -o: Required. The path to the output CSV file.
• --format, -f: Allows you to specify a custom column mapping to use when generating the CSV file. See the CSV Column Mapping section for more information.
• --force: Overwrites the output file if it already exists.

CSV Column Mapping

By default, csv2gpx will use the following column mapping:

• Column 1: Latitude
• Column 2: Longitude
• Column 3: Name
• Column 4: Description

Obviously, it wouldn't be very flexible if to require your CSV file to be in this format. For this reason, you can specify your own column mapping using the --format (or -f) option.

Column mapping values are zero-based indexes. For example, lat:0 maps the latitude to the first CSV column.

For this example, let's say you want to convert a CSV file that has the following output:

• Column 1: Name
• Column 2: Description
• Column 3: Latitude
• Column 4: Longitude

You would achieve this by appending the following to your command:

-f lat:2,lon:3,name:0,desc:1

NOTE: The order you specify these in does not matter, but you must specify the mappings for each of lat, lon, name, and desc.

It's also worth mentioning that you can ignore either the name or description entries if you either don't want to include them in your output or if your CSV file does not contain entries for them. For example, I could skip the description entry in my CSV file with the following:

-f lat:2,lon:3,name:0,desc:skip

Development Notes

These are just various notes for anyone wanting to hack on this project.

Running Tests

python3 -m unittest discover -s tests