Coordinate Grabber - Scrape GPS Coordinates from Web Pages

Jeff Boulton’s Coordinate Grabber is a nice little web based utility that allows you to scrape coordinates from any web page. You can then download them as a .LOC file to use in your mapping software and/or your GPS receiver.

There are a number of uses for this utility but what I have used it for is to create a map of the waypoints people have submitted for my ‘locationless’ geocache, Lewis and Clark Expedition. In order to ‘claim’ this cache one of the things required is to submit the coordinates of a Lewis & Clark Hysterical Site. By using Boulton’s Coordinate Grabber I can scrape all the submitted coordinates from the geocaching.com web page easily then use Microsoft Streets & Trips to plot them on a map which I post on the site. Grabbing coordinates in this way is much faster and more accurate than entering them by hand. Before using this utility I would rarely update the map.

You can enter the URL (but be careful since the default URL for geocaches only lists the first 5 logs) or better yet just enter the GCxxxx number, i.e. GC64AC, or just paste in the actual text you want to scrape.

Now hit the Grab button and the coordinates will appear in the left frame. It is the possible to rename or modify coordinates, uncheck any that you don’t want, then hit “Download Checked” to download them.

An option I have not used is the “Visualize” option which displays the coordinates on a map provided by GPS Visualizer.

Jeff has some other online utilities available that I have not ‘played’ with yet but look very helpful:

• Coordinate Converter, Maps and Info - Enter coordinates in just about any format and it will output them in 4 formats: decimal degrees, degrees-minutes-seconds, ‘GPS’ , and UTM. It will also display the coordinate on your choice of maps
• Geocaching Quick Search - A very ’smart’ search that allows you to enter just about anything and find Geocaches nearby. Some of the things you can enter: zip code, area code, GC waypoint, coordinates, and keyword. It also understands a number of meta-words taking you to the appropriate pages on geocaching.com Meta Words