Planet.osm to text

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Contents 1 Introduction 2 Source code 3 Usage 4 Output files 4.1 osm.txt 4.2 points.txt 4.3 ways.txt 4.4 stats.txt 5 Notes 6 Performance 7 Bugs, TODO 8 See also

Introduction

This is a perl script to convert Planet.osm into text-files.

Planet.osm is a XML file containing OpenStreetMap's output data. While many programs can use it directly, it can be quite slow and memory-intensive to parse, often overwhelming the more naïve XML implementations.

Text files are fast, human-readable, and the native file format for most operating systems and programming languages. So having OpenStreetMap data in text format can be useful.

Source code

• Planet.osm to text, source code

Usage

Save source code as convert.pl, and type:

perl convert.pl planet.osm

Output files

osm.txt

List of segments

• Latitude (start)
• Longitude (start)
• Latitude (end)
• Longitude (end)
• Class
• Name
• Highway type

Sample:

50.914915,-1.400628,50.915200,-1.399410,residential,,
50.915200,-1.399410,50.917200,-1.400710,residential,Dover Street,
50.917200,-1.400710,50.916900,-1.402500,residential,Mordaunt Road,
51.875281,-1.363597,51.875334,-1.361666,minor,,
51.868922,-1.377673,51.869134,-1.377072,secondary,B4437,

Currently osm.txt is 26MB (approx 20MB of lat/long + 6MB of text)

points.txt

List of nodes with interesting attributes

• Latitude
• Longitude
• Name
• Amenity
• Class

Sample:

51.086900,-1.267740,Chestnut Horse,,pub
51.090600,-1.254090,Chilland,,hamlet
51.085900,-1.271710,Cricketers,,pub
51.087800,-1.274500,EAS CH,,church
51.086400,-1.271930,Easton,,village
52.554483,-1.828250,Beeches Walk Post Office,post_office,

Currently points.txt is 627KB, and could be reduced if things with "class=node" were filtered-out

ways.txt

Temporary debug file

stats.txt

List of data statistics on the data encountered

Notes

Tags associated with a way overwrite any tags associated with the segments that are part of that way

Performance

4 minutes 7 seconds of computing time to convert the 2006-04 version of Planet.osm into text files, on a 700MHz/256MB PC

Bugs, TODO

• Slower than necessary when loading sparse datasets
• Weird results when node IDs are negative in the OSM file
• Should handle railways, waterways etc., as well as highways
• Put requests here

See also

• Planet.osm
• PHP rendering