Pulling GPS coordinates from Google Earth kmz files
We’re planning a quick trip out of town and I’m using the lowly free version of Google Earth that doesn’t integrate with a GPS device. So, I had got a series of places tagged in “My Places” and had sent the kmz file to myself via email. (My primary intent was to try and load the kmz on a laptop, but it looks like the video on that machine may not be up to snuff…) Anyway. I have this chat.kmz file and wondered how can I just get a list of places and gps coordinates out of this.
Being a linux user, my first instinct was to cat the file and see what it looked like, but it gave a string of jibberish. So, I started looking online and found very quickly that kmz files were a zip’ped version of the kml (keyhole markup language) file that was an xml based, plain text file…
So, it was as simple as unzip chat.kmz, which gave me a nicely readable doc.kml file (well, it DID have markup in it, but it was fairly easy to follow.) Not really a tough tip, but a quick one and it solved a question for me.