SVG path data format differences

Question

I'm working on a project where I need to parse svg path data.

Right now we're loading an svg, looking for the path tag, and pulling out it's d attribute.

For some of the artwork we'll get path data that is made up of coordinates which we can translate into the data types we need. E.g.

But other times the d value is in a more g-code-esq format.

Like in this case I drew a rectangle, converted it to a compound path:

And when I export it and look at the svg I get a d value like this:

Which we can't easily parse for the project.

My questions are:

• How do I read this second format? It doesn't seem to fit what I'm reading on MDN so I suspect there's some other documentation I need to refer to: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Attribute/d
• For illustrator users, is there a way of changing the format when exporting?

I know that this seems like more of an art question than a programming question, but I'm trying to understand the underlying reasoning behind the svg data structure so I can better parse it.

Answer 1

Oh! Oh ok, I was 100% misunderstanding the path data that I was reading. I didn't realize that the delimiting information was based on the letter. My brain wanted some specific character as a delimiter like a comma or pipe.

So reading (and in some cases re-reading :| ) the documentation, when I see:

M753,315H435.27V165H753Z

I can read that as:

• M753,315 Move to x,y coordinates x: 753 y:315
• H435.27 Starting at the current location, draw a horizontal line to the absolute x coordinate of 435.27
• V165 Starting at the current location, draw a vertical line to the absolute y coordinate of 165
• H753 Starting at the current location, draw a horizontal line to the absolute x coordinate of 753
• ZDraw a straight line to the initial point of this path to close the path. This doesn't necessarily mean a horizontal or vertical line, but the coincidence that we're at the same x coordinate that we started at means that if we draw a straight line we will get a vertical line to complete the rectangle

That seems right. Anything I missed or misunderstood?

Also, thank for all of the links. I appreciate the points :clap: :bows: