Creating Shapely LineString from two Points

Question

If have two points, from which I want to create a straight LineString object:

from shapely.geometry import Point, LineString
A = Point(0,0)
B = Point(1,1)

The Shapely manual for LineString states:

A sequence of Point instances is not a valid constructor parameter. A LineString is described by points, but is not composed of Point instances.

So if I have two points A and B, is there a shorter/better/easier way of creating a line AB than my current "best" guess...

AB = LineString(tuple(A.coords) + tuple(B.coords))

... which looks rather complicated. Is there an easier way?

---

With Shapely 1.3.2, the above statement from the manual is no longer correct. So from now on,

AB = LineString([A, B])

works!

Answer 1

Since Shapely 1.3, you can create a LineString from Points:

>>> from shapely.geometry import Point, LineString
>>> LineString([Point(0, 0), Point(1, 1)]).wkt
'LINESTRING (0 0, 1 1)'

Apologies for the contradiction in the manual.

• ojdo: On two machines (one Linux, one Windows), after upgrading to Shapely 1.3.1 (shapely.__version__ agrees) and pasting your code verbatim, I receive a ValueError from linestring.pyc#228 about "Input [<...Point object at 0x..>, <...Point object at 0x...>] is the wrong shape for a LineString". Have I missed something?
• ojdo: Update: the corresponding pull request #102 is only in master, not yet merged to branch 1.3 and thus not present in the current 1.3.1 release.
• sgillies: You're right. I've just now fixed this in github.com/Toblerity/Shapely/issues/130 and uploaded 1.3.2 to PyPI.
• ojdo: Check, it works now; thanks (again) for the speedy followup!

Answer 2

The base method is:

AB = LineString([(A.x,A.y), (B.x,B.y)])

You can also use slicing to concatenate the coordinate lists:

AB = LineString(A.coords[:] + B.coords[:])