VATSIM provides a lot of useful aviation data through the VATSIM data project - an extention of the VATSPY data format designed by Ross Carlson many years ago. Unfortunately, this format of this file can be extremely annoying to work with as the way it breaks down data is not commonly used in a lot of programming languages.
When we wanted to use the project as a data source, we recognized that the main VATSpy.dat file was so annoying to work with, that we wanted to convert it to a more usable JSON format and this tool is the result.
This tool is built in, and requires Python 3.9 and PIP to be work. It comes with an installer, allowing you to run it easily from your own machine.
Note, this is a commandline tool, and has no GUI.
- Download the release, or clone this repo to your local machine.
- Using your CLI, navigate to the downloaded folder.
- Run:
pip install -e .This will use pip to install the script to your PATH.
Once installed, you may now run the script using:
vatspy_dat_converter