[OSM-newbies] Planet data in more compact format?

[Russ Nelson]

On Apr 17, 2009, at 9:35 AM, Kelly Jones wrote:

> I've previously downloaded and bunzip2'd (or at least bzcat'd)
> planet-latest.osm.bz2.
>
> It's great and complete, but has many unnecessary characters (eg,  
> XML tags).
>
> Is there a compacter version of this information?

XML is an interchange and archive format, not a format that anybody  
actually uses inside their application.  When gzip or bzip2  
compressed, the wordiness of the XML gets compressed away.  In your  
own application, though, you should consider parsing and reformatting  
the data.

--
Russ Nelson - http://community.cloudmade.com/blog - http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:RussNelson
russ at cloudmade.com - Twitter: Russ_OSM - http://openstreetmap.org/user/RussNelson