Jason Silver

Thursday, May 27th, 2004

Geocaching.com Perl Script

I wrote a Perl script last night/tonight which solves a problem many Geocaching.com users might be facing.

When you sign up for an account at www.geocaching.com, you have access to thousands of Geocaches hidden all over the world. But unless you pay for an elite subscription, you can't download the special gpx files needed by so many of the software programs out there. All the information is on the free site, but the special gpx files with this information stored in a special format are not available.

Until now, that is.

I wrote a neat script which grabs whatever caches you want from the free section of www.geocaching.com, and converts this information into a gpx formatted file instantly.

Anyone can use it. All you need to know are the waypoints for each cache. Put them in the URL like this:
http://www.crookedbush.com/cgi-bin/geocache.pl?WP=GCGRPH|GC5473|GCGDQQ|GCJ62Y|GCGY8X|GCJ81R|GCJDGW

Notice how they're separated by the veritcal pipe (|) symbol? Then view the source of the page and save it to your pocket pc, or other GPX reading device.

I'm still messing with the formatting, trying to get it to display right in the software I'm using. I'm excited that it's so easy now to get the GPX files you need any time, FOR FREE.

~Jason