Shallow Thoughts : tags : grep

Editing GPX Track Files from OsmAnd in a Text Editor

I record track files in OsmAnd for most of my hikes. But about a quarter of the time, when I get back to the car, I forget to turn tracking off. So I end up with a track file that shows the hike plus at least part of the car trip afterward. Not very useful for purposes like calculating mileage.

My PyTopo can do simple track edits, like splitting the track into two or deleting from some point to the end. But most of the time it's easier just to edit the GPX file with a text editor.

Eesh, edit GPX directly?? Sounds like something you oughtn't do, doesn't it? But actually, GPX (a form of XML) is human readable and editable. And this specific case, separating the walking from the car trip in an OsmAnd track file, is particularly easy, because OsmAnd helpfully adds a speed to every point it saves.

These instructions seem long, but really, once you've done it once, you'll realize that it's all very straightforward; explaining the steps is harder than doing them.

Read more ...

Tags: mapping, osmand, grep
[ 14:13 Jan 07, 2022    More mapping | permalink to this entry | ]

Yet more on that comma-inserting regexp, plus a pattern to filter unprintable characters

One more brief followup on that comma inserting sed pattern and its followup:

$ echo 20130607215015 | sed ':a;s/\b\([0-9]\+\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)\b/\1,\2/;ta'
20,130,607,215,015

In the second article, I'd mentioned that the hardest part of the exercise was figuring out where we needed backslashes. Devdas (f3ew) asked on Twitter whether I would still need all the backslash escapes even if I put the pattern in a file -- in other worse, are the backslashes merely to get the shell to pass special characters unchanged?

A good question, and I suspected the need for some of the backslashes would disappear. So I tried this:

$ echo ':a;s/\b\([0-9]\+\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)\b/\1,\2/;ta' >/tmp/commas   
$ echo 20130607215015 | sed -f /tmp/commas

And it didn't work. No commas were inserted.

The problem, it turns out, is that my shell, zsh, changed both instances of \b to an ASCII backspace, ^H. Editing the file fixes that, and so does

$ echo -E ':a;s/\b\([0-9]\+\)\([0-9]\{3\}\)\b/\1,\2/;ta' >/tmp/commas   

But that only applies to echo: zsh doesn't do the \b -> ^H substitution in the original command, where you pass the string directly as a sed argument.

Okay, with that straightened out, what about Devdas' question?

Surprisingly, it turns out that all the backslashes are still needed. None of them go away when you echo > file, so they weren't there just to get special characters past the shell; and if you edit the file and try removing some of the backslashes, you'll see that the pattern no longer works. I had thought at least some of them, like the ones before the \{ \}, were extraneous, but even those are still needed.

Filtering unprintable characters

As long as I'm writing about regular expressions, I learned a nice little tidbit last week. I'm getting an increasing flood of Asian-language spams which my mail ISP doesn't filter out (they use spamassassin, which is pretty useless for this sort of filtering). I wanted a simple pattern I could pass to egrep (via procmail) that would filter out anything with a run of more than 4 unprintable characters in a row. [^[:print:]]{4,} should do it, but it wasn't working.

The problem, it turns out, is the definition of what's printable. Apparently when the default system character set is UTF-8, just about everything is considered printable! So the trick is that you need to set LC_ALL to something more restrictive, like C (which basically means ASCII) to before :print: becomes useful for language-based filtering. (Thanks to Mikachu for spotting the problem).

So in a terminal, you can do something like

LC_ALL=C egrep -v '[^[:print:]]' filename

In procmail it was a little harder; I couldn't figure out any way to change LC_ALL from a procmail recipe; the only solution I came up with was to add this to ~/.procmailrc:

export LC_ALL=C

It does work, though, and has cut the spam load by quite a bit.

Tags: zsh, regexp, sed, cmdline, grep
[ 19:35 Jul 24, 2013    More linux/cmdline | permalink to this entry | ]