Edit GPX File

GPX, the GPS interchange format, is the type of file used by the vast majority of GPS hardware and software vendors.

When downloading the logs from your GPS unit, they can be downloaded in GPX or similar formats. GPX uses the XML format to store information and it looks a lot like simple HTML.

For people familiar with building and editing simple web pages, the data contained in a GPX file is very easy to understand, since the tags are similar to those in HTML.

A device saves GPX data as a standard Unicode text file, usually with the extension GPX.

Simple files with few items are less than 100 Kb. These files are self-contained, so their format requires only one file to describe a complete set of map data.

Since XML is a practically universal format, GPX files can be edited in a variety of programs with relative ease. As an example, a GPX file starts with a standard XML file declaration like

“<? Xml version =" 1.0 "?>".

This tells the reader to expect XML tags in the file.

Steps to follow to edit a GPX file

Step 1

Open the GPX file in an XML editor. It could be the Windows Notepad. However, you can use a more specialized editor due to the help of color highlighting.

Step 2

Modify the information that you are interested in changing. For example, if you have a whole day of GPS tracks and you want to highlight one hour points, you can search the GPX file for the time stamps.

Step 3

Since GPX is an extensible format, there is not necessarily a limit on the number of tag types that can be used. GPX files generally contain information about track position points, time, speed and altitude. Other information may include the location of the landmark and labels.