Shapely

It was designed especially for developers working with cutting edge geographic and geometric data in information systems.

It is not concerned with data formats or coordinate systems.

It is based on the widely deployed GEOS (the engine of PostGIS) and JTS (from which GEOS is ported) libraries.

This C dependency is traded for the ability to analyze geometries with blazing speed.

Shapely lets you do PostGIS-ish stuff outside the context of a database using idiomatic Python.

What is new in this release:

• Setup file encoding bug fix.
• Support for pyinstaller.
• Major prepared geometry operation fix for Windows.
• Major fix for OS X binary wheel.

What is new in version 1.5.7:

• Fixed OS X binary wheel library load path.

What is new in version 1.5.6:

• Fixed OS X binary wheel library load path.

What is new in version 1.4.0:

• SVG representations for IPython's inline image protocol.
• Efficient and fast vectorized contains().
• Change mitre_limit default to 5.0; raise ValueError with 0.0.
• Allow mix of tuples and Points in sped-up LineString ctor.
• New STRtree class.
• Added ops.nearest_points().
• Faster creation of geometric objects from others (cloning).
• Removal of tests from package.

What is new in version 1.3.0:

• Include support for Python 3.2 and 3.3 (#56), minimum version is now 2.6.
• Switch to GEOS WKT/WKB Reader/Writer API, with defaults changed to enable 3D output dimensions, and to 'trim' WKT output for GEOS >=3.3.0.

What is new in version 1.2.19:

• Added buffering style options.

What is new in version 1.2.16:

• Add ops.unary_union function.
• Alias ops.cascaded_union to ops.unary_union when GEOS CAPI >= (1,7,0).
• Add geos_version_string attribute to shapely.geos.
• Ensure parent is set when child geometry is accessed.
• Generate _speedups.c using Cython when building from repo when missing, stale, or the build target is "sdist".

What is new in version 1.2.15:

• Eliminate numerical sensitivity in a method chaining test (Debian bug #663210).
• Account for cascaded union of random buffered test points being a polygon or multipolygon (Debian bug #666655).
• Use Cython to build speedups if it is installed.

What is new in version 1.2.14:

• A geometry's coords property is now sliceable, yielding a list of coordinate values.
• Homogeneous collections are now sliceable, yielding a new collection of the same type.

What is new in version 1.2.13:

• Fixed errors in speedups on 32bit systems when GEOS references memory above 2GB.
• Add shapely.__version__ attribute.
• Update the manual.

What is new in version 1.2.12:

• Build Windows distributions with VC7 or VC9 as appropriate.
• More verbose report on failure to speed up.
• Fix for prepared geometries broken in 1.2.11.

What is new in version 1.2.11:

• Ignore AttributeError during exit.
• PyPy 1.5 support.
• Prevent operation on prepared geometry crasher.
• Optional Cython speedups for Windows.
• Linux 3 platform support.

What is new in version 1.2.10:

• Add optional Cython speedups.
• Add is_cww predicate to LinearRing.
• Add function that forces orientation of Polygons.
• Disable build of speedups on Windows pending packaging work.

Requirements:

• Python 2.5 to 3
• libgeos_c 3.1 or higher
• Python ctypes