Question

I am copying GPS coordinates into a text file to use for a website displaying a google map. Before, I was using a php script to take the gps coordinates and some long strings to create a kml document that I could display. That doesn’t seem like the best way. I have the text file, gpsinfo.txt, with information for 4 datapoints that looks like this when opened:

7.784606,63.10403 7.784606,64.10403 7.784606,65.10403 7.784606,66.10403

How should I use that text file to create the 4 points on my webpage?

I was thinking about using a php file to create a js file that my webpage could read, but that doesn’t sound like a very clean method.

Answer 1

This is what I am doing to solve this:

I have a php file scrape some webpages to get GPS coordinates, and then I copy them into a text file but in a JSON format:

  [{ "boat": "Edda", "coordinates" : { "lat" : 7.80086, "lon": 64.75658}}, { "......

Then I have a php file that is reads the file and is accessed by my webpage using ajax and outputs the string and then the webpage handles it.

ajax on webpage:

<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript">
var point;
microAjax("BackgroundFiles/genjsonGPS.php", function (res) {

  var json_obj = JSON.parse(res.toString());

  initialize(json_obj);
  window.setTimeout(function(){

    }, 500);      
});

  </script>

genjsonGPS.php:

<?php

$myFile = "vesselGPS.txt";
$fh = fopen($myFile, 'r');
$vesselGPS = fread($fh, filesize($myFile));
fclose($fh);

echo($vesselGPS);


?>