extracting "corrected coordinates" from "personal cache notes"

Question

upon exporting a GPX from a VGPS, p-gc tries to be smart and parses personal cache notes for coordinates and if it finds coordinates, independent of any context, it puts them into the "corrected latitude / corrected longitude" columns in a CSV export of the VGPS in question (It seems it operates on a first come first server princple).

Although I realize why this has been implemented this way, long time ago, now that Groundspeak supports a clear definition of what "corrected coordinates" are, I consider p-gc's behaviour a bad thing to do.

Here is an example: Assume I am working with a "Traditonal Cache", and I put parking coordinates into the Personal Cache Notes (because the owner has the parking coordinates only as plain text in his listing), p-gc takes the parking coordinates and puts the into the CSV as "corrected coordinates", essentially overriding the coordinates where I would truely find the cache in the field.

The least thing I would like to ask for is that I want to be able to optionally disable this functionality as it completely screws up my workflow.

To the authors of p-gc: Thank you very much for providing p-gc!

Answer 1

I'm not entirely sure about the new API just released, but with the old API there was no way for us to retrieve the corrected coordinates for all caches that a user had corrected coordinates for; we had to try each one blindly and see if it had any. In effect, we would have to fetch all caches in the world for every cacher using Project-GC. That's not feasible. In contrast, there is a single API call that returns all caches that a user has written a personal cache note for.

As for your actual problem: if you prefix your coordinate in the personal cache note field with a caret ("^"), then Project-GC will ignore it.

Comments

Thanks very much. I'm confident the "^" will fix my workflow. I'll try right away and, for completeness, will post the results here.

BTW: Is this documented anywhere? Do the coords have to start at the beginning of a line or will it work if I wrote:

Parking: ^Nxx yy.zzz Exxx yy.zzz ?

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Checked it, works PERFECT. Thanks much for your help. My question whether the "^" has to be at the beginning of a line has been resolved too: It doesn't have to be beginning of a line ;)

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The coordinates can be anywhere in the note, not just at the beginning of a line. The coordinates that will be used as corrected coordinates for the cache are the first ones found in the note, if there is more than one set.