Shapely

Shapely is a package for creation, manipulation, and analysis of planar geometries – designed especially for developers of cutting edge geographic information systems. In a nutshell: Shapely lets you do PostGIS-ish stuff outside the context of a database using idiomatic Python.

Shapely plays well with matplotlib and has several handy usage examples:

Illustrate results of the intersect example

Current distributions:  1.0.14,  1.2a6

Last, but not least: Shapely has a  manual with narrative documentation.

Dependencies

Installation

Windows users should use the executable  installer, which contains the required GEOS DLL. Other users should acquire and install libgeos_c by any means, such as by executing

$ apt-get install libgeos-c1

Then install from the Python package index:

$ easy_install Shapely

or

$ pip install Shapely

Support

If you have questions, please consider subscribing to the  community list ( archives) shared with Geojson, Rtree, and OWSLib.

Development

See also: