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Last Weekend something happened during a morning ride on my bike with some friends and my GPS device turned off for no reason. When I turned it back on I didn’t have the choice of continuing a previous ride and I had to create a new ride.

When I got home and tried to upload the information the Strava I couldn’t find any feature which could let me merge rides and fixe the issue. Instead I ended up having two different rides which really annoyed me.

I started googling around and found someone suggesting that I export the rides and merge the contents of the files. They also suggested that this could be done directly concatenating the files which isn’t true. The trick here is to extract the tracking data from the files (GPX files exported from Strava are XML based) and using the first one as the metadata template.

This was the result of a very simple GPX merger:

#!/usr/bin/env php -q
<?php
/*
* StravaMerger © David Gouveia - http://www.davidgouveia.net
* Simple script to merge tracking data from Strava's exported GPX files.
* The backtrack_limit is there because some files could not be parsed due to their size.
* Feel free to raise the limit but be carrefull not to cross the limit.
* Instead of using regex, I could have used a XML cursor to overcome the backtrack limit
* but either I would have to use the php_xml extension or build my own parser.
*/
ini_set("pcre.backtrack_limit", "10000000");
 
if ( !trim( $argv[1] ) || trim( !$argv[2] ) || sizeof($argv) < 4 )
               die("Usage:\n$argv[0] file1.gpx file2.gpx <fileN.gpx> output.gpx\n" );
 
$segments ="";
 
 
for($i = 1; $i < sizeof($argv) - 1; $i++)
{
        echo "Processing $argv[$i] ...";
        if (!is_file( $argv[$i] ) ) die( "Invalid file: $argv[$i]\n" );
 
        $gpx = file_get_contents( $argv[$i] );
        if ( $i == 1 )  preg_match( "/^(.*?)<trkseg>.*?<\/trkseg>(.*?)$/is", $gpx, $metadata );
        preg_match("/<trkseg>(.*?)<\/trkseg>/ims", $gpx, $matches);
        if( trim( $matches[1] ) )
        {
                $segments .= $matches[1];
                echo "[OK]\n";
        }
        else
                echo "[FAIL]\n";
 
}
 
$output_file = $metadata[1] . "<trkseg>" . $segments . "</trkseg>" . $metadata[2];
 
file_put_contents($argv[sizeof($argv) -1], $output_file) or die( "Unable to create destination GPX\n" );
print "File " . $argv[sizeof($argv) -1] . " successfully created.\n";

I’m going to put an online version of this script to make it easier to use. 😉