How do I find out if a given lat lon is in a KML Linear ring using shapely?

Question

I'm a GIS n00b. I have some LinearRings in a KML file that give the areas for a bunch of different regions. And then I (will) have some lat lons that I want to test to see if they're in any of the (about 8) different regions that I have LinearRings for. I want to use python and shapely looks like it's a good fit, but it doesn't deal with kml data at all. Is there a standard way to do things like load KML that I can then import into shapely? I'm having trouble putting all the pieces together.

Answer 1

Both Keytree and FastKML parse KML placemarks into GeoJSON-ish objects that are easy to use with Shapely. Here's an example of using Keytree:

from urllib import urlopen
from xml.etree import ElementTree

import keytree
from shapely.geometry import Point, shape

# Parse the KML doc
doc = urlopen("http://pleiades.stoa.org/places/638753/kml").read()
tree = ElementTree.fromstring(doc)
kmlns = tree.tag.split('}')[0][1:]

# Find all Polygon elements anywhere in the doc
elems = tree.findall(".//{%s}Polygon" % kmlns)

# Here's our point of interest
p = Point(28.722144580890763, 37.707799701548467)

# Filter polygon elements using this lambda (anonymous function)
# keytree.geometry() makes a GeoJSON-like geometry object from an
# element and shape() makes a Shapely object of that.
hits = filter(
    lambda e: shape(keytree.geometry(e)).contains(p),
    elems )

print hits
# Output:  [<Element {http://www.opengis.net/kml/2.2}Polygon at ...>]

Once you've found the elements that contain the point, you can use the xml module's etree API to inspect them further.