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How do you get/extract the points that define a shapely polygon? Thanks!

Example of a shapely polygon

from shapely.geometry import Polygon

# Create polygon from lists of points
x = [list of x vals]
y = [list of y vals]

polygon = Polygon(x,y)
Georgy
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ryanjdillon
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9 Answers9

129

The trick is to use a combination of the Polygon class methods:

from shapely.geometry import Polygon

# Create polygon from lists of points
x = [0.0, 0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0]
y = [0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0]

poly = Polygon(zip(x,y))

# Extract the point values that define the perimeter of the polygon
xx, yy = poly.exterior.coords.xy

# Note above return values are of type `array.array` 
assert x == xx.tolist()
assert y == yy.tolist()

If you would like them as coordinate pairs

assert tuple(poly.exterior.coords) == tuple(zip(x,y))
ryanjdillon
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    This gives the x and y coords as separate lists. For list as individual (x,y) tuples use the `poly.exterior.coords` per @pnklein 's answer below, or use `sh.get_coordinates(poly)` to get np array of arrays[x,y] – Robbes Jan 06 '23 at 09:21
76

It took me a while to learn that a Polygon has an exterior boundary and possibly several interior boundaries. I am posting here because some of the answers don't reflect that distinction, though to be fair the original post did not use as an example a polygon with interior boundaries.

The points forming the exterior boundary are arranged in a CoordinateSequence, which can be obtained as

polygon.exterior.coords

You can find the length of this object using len(polygon.exterior.coords) and can index the object like a list. To get the first vertex, for example, use polygon.exterior.coords[0]. Note that the first and last points are the same; if you want a list consisting of the vertices without that repeated point, use polygon.exterior.coords[:-1].

You can convert the CoordinateSequence (including the repeated vertex) to a list of points thus:

list(polygon.exterior.coords)

Similarly, the CoordinateSequence consisting of the vertices forming the first interior boundary is obtained as polygon.interiors[0].coords, and the list of those vertices (without the repeated point) is obtained as polygon.interiors[0].coords[:-1].

pnklein
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  • How would you get all coordinates subtended by the polygon? So any points lying inside the Polygon, how to get those coordinates? – Will.Evo Apr 02 '20 at 18:51
34

You can use the shapely mapping function:

>>> from shapely.geometry import Polygon, mapping
>>> sh_polygon = Polygon(((0,0), (1,1), (0,1)))
>>> mapping(sh_polygon)
{'type': 'Polygon', 'coordinates': (((0.0, 0.0), (1.0, 1.0), (0.0, 1.0), (0.0, 0.0)),)}
Ikar Pohorský
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13

I used this:

list(zip(*p.exterior.coords.xy))

Polygon created with: p = Polygon([(0,0),(1,1),(1,0),(0,0)]) returns:

[(0.0, 0.0), (1.0, 1.0), (1.0, 0.0), (0.0, 0.0)]
Anton vBR
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8

If you really want the shapely point objects that make up the polygon, and not just tuples of coordinates, you can do that this way:

points = MultiPoint(polygon.boundary.coords)
Rick
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2

You can convert a shapely Polygon to a NumPy array using NumPy.array. I find using NumPy arrays more useful than the arrays returned by coords.xy, since the coordinates are paired, rather than in two one-dimensional arrays. Use whichever is more useful to your application.

import numpy as np
x = [1, 2, 3, 4]
y = [9, 8, 7, 6]
polygon = Polygon(x,y)
points = np.array(polygon)

# points is:
[[ 1 9]
 [ 2 8]
 [ 3 7]
 [ 4 6]]
mkosmala
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  • Good thinking. Thanks! I think I was using this when I had an un-ordered group of points, and by using `coords.xy` I was able to pull out an ordered list of external points, or perhaps the external points of a grid... I'll play with this when I have time and report back :) – ryanjdillon Apr 28 '16 at 09:20
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    The above code doesn't work with shapely=1.5.13=py35_0. `Polygon(x,y)` is not accepted. `np.array(some_actual_polygon)` also does not behave as shown. – Masterfool Jul 22 '16 at 21:32
  • We get this warning in from Shapely 2.0 onwards.C:\ProgramData\Anaconda3\envs\gis\lib\site-packages\IPython\core\interactiveshell.py:3457: ShapelyDeprecationWarning: The array interface is deprecated and will no longer work in Shapely 2.0. Convert the '.coords' to a numpy array instead. exec(code_obj, self.user_global_ns, self.user_ns). Therefore using points = np.array(polygon.coors) – addcolor Jan 05 '22 at 10:46
2

Update (2017-06-09):

As the last answer seems not to work anymore with newest version of shapely, I propose this update.

shapely provides the Numpy array interface (as the doc says: http://toblerity.org/shapely/project.html )

So, let poly be a shapely polygon geometry:

In [2]: type(poly)
Out[2]: shapely.geometry.polygon.Polygon

This command will do the conversion to a numpy array:

In [3]: coordinates_array = np.asarray(poly.exterior.coords)

Hint:
One must need to give the exterior.coords for a polygon because giving the direct geometry seems not to work either:

In [4]: coordinates_array = np.asarray(poly)
Out[4]: array(<shapely.geometry.polygon.Polygon object at 0x7f627559c510>, dtype=object)    
swiss_knight
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2

You can use any of the two following methods.

1)

p = Polygon([(1,0),(1,1),(0,1),(0,0)])
for x,y in p.exterior.coords:
   print(x,y)

The above code prints the following. Note that (1,0) is printed twice, since exterior.coords returns an ordered sequence that completes the polygon.

1.0 0.0
1.0 1.0
0.0 1.0
0.0 0.0
1.0 0.0

2)

p.exterior.coords.xy

It outputs the following

(array('d', [1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0, 1.0]), array('d', [0.0, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0]))
Roomba
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    Those two methods are the same, and the same as [my answer](https://stackoverflow.com/a/20476150/943773) from 2013-12-09. – ryanjdillon Jan 09 '18 at 19:18
  • @ryanjdillon yeah the second one is the same as yours. The first one though I felt is a more intuitive way to unpack the xy pairs. – Roomba Jan 10 '18 at 06:40
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    The question was how to obtain the coordinates, not how to unpack tuples. I'm responding to this because this does answer does not add additional information for how to obtain the coords, and it is not the first to repeat an already existing answer, like [this one](https://stackoverflow.com/a/47519098/943773). Your suggestion would best be made in the form of a comment on an existing answer. Answers like this create unnecessary cruft for people to go through to find the critical information. – ryanjdillon Jan 10 '18 at 13:23
-1
d0=[]
for n in range(0,len(gdf1['geometry'])):
    try:
        k=(len(gdf1['geometry'][n].geoms))    
        ce+=1
    except:
        d0.append(n)
mapper
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    You might want to add an explanation what the code does and why it is better than the other answers. – BDL May 27 '22 at 08:24
  • This appears to compose a list of geometries in gdf that are not muli-polygons, which is not applicable to the question asked. For this problem, I might rather use `DataFrame.apply()`, as is proposed in [this SO question thread](https://stackoverflow.com/q/60780959/943773). – ryanjdillon Jun 15 '22 at 09:24