How to extract the lat/lng of pins in google maps?

Question

I want to extract the latitude and longitude of a set of about 50-100 pins in a Google maps web page. I don't control the page and I don't need to do it more than once so I'm looking for something quick and dirty. I've got FireFox with FireBug as well as Chrome and all I need is something that's easier than re typing all the numbers.

Answer 1

Simply click the link shortcut on the map to retreive a URL for the map with pins in.

Next add &output=kml to the end of this url and use the link to retrieve a kml file containing all the pin data.

This kml file is actually in xml format so parsing it should be easy, you just need to look for <coordinates> elements which contain the latitude and longitude data you need.

The kml format is documented here: http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/kmlreference.html

Answer 2

Just saving the .html file and using regex works:

These two reg-ex might be good starting points:

@[0-9]+\.[0-9]+,-[0-9]+.[0-9]+",geocode:"",sxti:"[-@A-Za-z .]+"
{id:"[A-Zloc0-9]+",fid