Gpx Spinner Symbols

[+robotman]

I'm starting to use GPX Spinner to convert waypoints and their icons to something useful on my Magellan SporTrak. The program works great and has been a big help!

 

One strange thing is that it converts all "&" to ";amp" in the comments. Is there a way to stop it from doing this? I know that the "&" may not be Magellan-friendly, but I don't like how it replaces it with 4 characters ":amp". Anyway to just make it ignore the "&"?

 

Thanks.

[robertlipe]

I don't use Spinner, but I can totally understand why it's doing what it's doing. I'll wager it will suprise you for less than, greater than, and apostrophes, too. If so, there are actually several dozen affected characters, but those are the ones most likely to appear in a cache page.)

 

Basically, it sounds like the programmer forgot to handle XML entities in the input and decode them to ASCII before sending them to the receiver. Send a test case and a polite explanation to the Lil Devil and I'll bet he can help. (And feel free to send Lil Devil my way in case the explanation is less than a forehead-smacker to him.)

[+robotman]

OK... I thought I was going crazy because I just reprinted out the maps from ExpertGPS and most of the problems are fixed in the most recent cache files.

 

After a bit of backtracking, the problem isn't with spinner (sorry!)... it's with the GPX file being sent from the GC site... The GC engine is replacing all the '&' with '&" (like good XML code). For example:

 

<name>GCH49B</name>

<desc>Dolores Park & Bark by PisoMojado, Traditional Cache (1.5/1)</desc>

<url>http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?wp=GCH49B</url>

<urlname>Dolores Park & Bark by PisoMojado</urlname>

 

Evidently several of the cache owners realize that the name of their caches are getting messed up in the GPX files and are replacing the ampersands with the word "and" so they appear correctly in the GPX files now.

 

I suppose GPX spinner could be tricky and filter out the 'amp;' and replace it with a real ampersand during the "smart comment" creation. I'll ask Lil Devil.

 

I'll contact GC and see if there is anything they can do, too.

 

Thanks.

[robertlipe]

After a bit of backtracking, the problem isn't with spinner (sorry!)... it's with the GPX file being sent from the GC site... The GC engine is replacing all the '&' with '&" (like good XML code). For

It's *supposed* to do that - as you said, that's part of the XML definition. It's called entity escaping and XML readers have to be able to handle this.

[+robotman]

I know "good" XML code should do the replacement. I was just a little confused where the substitution was taking place. I think I got it all straight now.

 

As you point out, it's really more of the readers problem in not interpretting the XML code correctly. It would be nice if spinner had a quick replace function to fix something like this, but I agree that it's more of the end XML reader's problem.

 

I've contacted the ExpertGPS authors to let them know that there is a bug with their parsing. Usually Dan is very responsive and fixes any bugs that are pointed out.

[topografix]

Yes, I'll try to get this fixed in a future version of ExpertGPS.

 

- Dan