Welcome to the PyGEOS documentation

PyGEOS is a C/Python library with vectorized geometry functions. The geometry operations are done in the open-source geometry library GEOS. PyGEOS wraps these operations in NumPy ufuncs providing a performance improvement when operating on arrays of geometries.

Why ufuncs?

A universal function (or ufunc for short) is a function that operates on n-dimensional arrays in an element-by-element fashion, supporting array broadcasting. The for-loops that are involved are fully implemented in C diminishing the overhead of the Python interpreter.

The Geometry object

The pygeos.Geometry object is a container of the actual GEOSGeometry object. A C pointer to this object is stored in a static attribute of the Geometry object. This keeps the python interpreter out of the ufunc inner loop. The Geometry object keeps track of the underlying GEOSGeometry and allows the python garbage collector to free memory when it is not used anymore.

Geometry objects are immutable. Construct them as follows:

>>> from pygeos import Geometry

>>> geometry = Geometry.from_wkt("POINT (5.2 52.1)")

Or using one of the provided (vectorized) functions:

>>> from pygeos import points

>>> point = points(5.2, 52.1)

Indices and tables