.PLN files are annoying, so I made a library which lets you actually do something with them

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As you know, MSFS 2020 uses .PLN files to plan routes. They’re pretty annoying because:

  1. They use XML. Is this 1999?
  2. They display latitude and longitude in a format which is pretty difficult to do anything with.

I wrote a simple script in Python to do a few things:

  1. Read an PLN file into a Python dictionary so you can do something with it.
  2. Read the latitudes and longitudes in the annoying PLN format and convert them to decimal lat/lons which you can, for instance, plot on a map.
  3. Outputs this all to a lovely usable JSON.

It also includes an example.py to show how it works and a sample.pln file which you can use to test.

This is open source and comes with a GNU public licence. Hope you find it useful.

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