geopandas.GeoSeries.shortest_line

GeoSeries.shortest_line(other, align=None)

Returns the shortest two-point line between two geometries.

The resulting line consists of two points, representing the nearest points between the geometry pair. The line always starts in the first geometry a and ends in he second geometry b. The endpoints of the line will not necessarily be existing vertices of the input geometries a and b, but can also be a point along a line segment.

The operation works on a 1-to-1 row-wise manner:

Align:

center

Parameters:

otherGeoseries or geometric object

The Geoseries (elementwise) or geometric object to find the shortest line with.

alignbool | None (default None)

If True, automatically aligns GeoSeries based on their indices. If False, the order of elements is preserved. None defaults to True.

Returns:

GeoSeries

Examples

>>> from shapely.geometry import Polygon, LineString, Point
>>> s = geopandas.GeoSeries(
...     [
...         Polygon([(0, 0), (2, 2), (0, 2)]),
...         Polygon([(0, 0), (2, 2), (0, 2)]),
...         LineString([(0, 0), (2, 2)]),
...         LineString([(2, 0), (0, 2)]),
...         Point(0, 1),
...     ],
... )
>>> s
0    POLYGON ((0 0, 2 2, 0 2, 0 0))
1    POLYGON ((0 0, 2 2, 0 2, 0 0))
2             LINESTRING (0 0, 2 2)
3             LINESTRING (2 0, 0 2)
4                       POINT (0 1)
dtype: geometry

We can also do intersection of each geometry and a single shapely geometry:

>>> p = Point(3, 3)
>>> s.shortest_line(p)
0    LINESTRING (2 2, 3 3)
1    LINESTRING (2 2, 3 3)
2    LINESTRING (2 2, 3 3)
3    LINESTRING (1 1, 3 3)
4    LINESTRING (0 1, 3 3)
dtype: geometry

We can also check two GeoSeries against each other, row by row. The GeoSeries above have different indices than the one below. We can either align both GeoSeries based on index values and compare elements with the same index using align=True or ignore index and compare elements based on their matching order using align=False:

>>> s2 = geopandas.GeoSeries(
...     [
...         Polygon([(0.5, 0.5), (1.5, 0.5), (1.5, 1.5), (0.5, 1.5)]),
...         Point(3, 1),
...         LineString([(1, 0), (2, 0)]),
...         Point(10, 15),
...         Point(0, 1),
...     ],
...     index=range(1, 6),
... )

>>> s.shortest_line(s2, align=True)
0                             None
1    LINESTRING (0.5 0.5, 0.5 0.5)
2            LINESTRING (2 2, 3 1)
3            LINESTRING (2 0, 2 0)
4          LINESTRING (0 1, 10 15)
5                             None
dtype: geometry
>>>

>>> s.shortest_line(s2, align=False)
0    LINESTRING (0.5 0.5, 0.5 0.5)
1            LINESTRING (2 2, 3 1)
2        LINESTRING (0.5 0.5, 1 0)
3          LINESTRING (0 2, 10 15)
4            LINESTRING (0 1, 0 1)
dtype: geometry