Re: [Gpsbabel-misc] Can GPSBabel create TomTom .ov2 files with Phone number?

[Robert M. <Ro...@mo...>]

I’m not aware of any special handling that is required for phone numbers in the .ov2 file.

I use an Excel .xlsx file to hold the name and phone columns separate. I then run the concatenation formula to combine the name and phone columns into one field with the > character separating the name and phone number. I then save the .xlsx file as a.csv UTF-8 file.

If an .ov2 file has POIs with both name and telephone number then at the moment GPSBabel will see the name and phone number as text of a name, i.e. POI-name>POI-number (Where POI-number is of course a number)

What would be fantastic is if GPSBabel could read an .ov2 file and if it finds a > then it knows that there are Name and Phone fields and so to use the > as a delimiter, with text on the left of the > as the name field and text on the right of the > as a telephone number. The > is then ignored and not placed in either field.

There doesn’t need to be any error checking of the number as there are too many formats as the number of digits in telephone numbers can vary depending on the region. Error checking of the number should be left to the user, except for ensuring that just numbers follow the > symbol.

By the way, TomTom’s POIs in their own products are extended with fields for URL, email, etc. Unfortunately, TomTom have so far not made public (and probably never will) how to create extended POIs. Therefore the most that we can code on a TomTom .ov2 POI file is name and telephone number.

Kind Regards,
RobertM

From: <rob...@gm...> on behalf of Robert Lipe <rob...@gp...>
Date: Friday, 24 February 2017 at 18:07
To: Robert Morton <Ro...@mo...>
Cc: "gps...@li..." <gps...@li...>
Subject: Re: [Gpsbabel-misc] Can GPSBabel create TomTom .ov2 files with Phone number?

Thanx for the good explanation.

Looking at tomtom.cc, I don't see any special handling for phone number, which is a field type we really don't think too much about in GPSBabel. So if there's any special handling required in the .ov2 file for it, we don't do that. If the device itself parses phone numbers after the >, it should be fine, but we dont' know of a special place in the ov2 for it.

If you have addition information about the ov2 format on how to store or retrieve phone data from that format, we'd welcome changes to ov2 to handle it.


On Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 7:05 AM, Robert Morton <Ro...@mo...<mailto:Ro...@mo...>> wrote:
Hi,

Firstly, I am a newbie to GPSBabel, so apologies if I’m doing something wrong either here or with GPSBabel.

It is possible to use the phone keyword to include a telephone number in a TomTom .ov2 POI file, where there is a number in the phone field?

This is done by adding a Greater Than Symbol, i.e. ">" (without quotes), after the POI description in the name field followed by the phone number. (e.g. "My House>441234222444" for telephone number +44 1234 222444 ).

I am using Universal csv with field structure in first line (unicsv). I am using the keyword “phone” for the phone number but I can’t seem to get GPSBabel to including the phone number in the TomTom .ov2 file.

I’m using Mac GPSBabel 1.5.4.
I’m converting .csv (saved via TextEdit as Unicode UTF-8) to .ov2.
GPSBabel input file is set to “Universal csv with field structure in first line”

I have 4 columns in csv file: Longitude (column A); Latitude (column B); Name (column C); and Phone (column D)

I can concatenate the name column and the phone column (if it contains a number) with a separating Greater Than Symbol into a new column, in MS Excel. I then copy & paste special (value) into a final column and then delete the unnecessary columns to be ready to convert to a csv file and then pass through GPSBabel. However it would be nice if this could all be done in GPSBabel as it would remove a lot of steps and make things easier to explain. By the way the MS Excel concatenation formula that I use is:

=C1&IF(D1="","",">"&D1)

Information on how to create a TomTom .ov2 POI file with telephone number can be seen:
http://www.tomtom.com/lib/doc/TomTomTips/index.html?poi_third_party_tools.htm

Many thanks,
RobertM

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