Return end-vertices of an sf linestring

Question

I am trying to return the vertices of a linestring using the sf package. So far I have:

ls  <- st_sfc(st_linestring(rbind(c(0,0),c(0,1))),
        st_linestring(rbind(c(0,0),c(10,0))))

get_line_endings <- function(line){

  res <- lapply(line, function(x){ 
            pnts <- st_coordinates(x)
            pnts <- pnts[c(1, nrow(pnts)),]
            data.frame(pnts)
          })

  res <- do.call("rbind", res)
  res <- res[!duplicated(res),]

  st_as_sf(res, coords = c("X", "Y"), crs = st_crs(line))
}

pnts <- get_line_endings(ls)

plot(ls)
plot(pnts, add = TRUE)

Is this error prone? Can I rely on st_coordinates being "in order"? Is there a more efficient way of doing this?

Answer 1

st_cast is what you are looking for.

library(sf)
library(mapview)

ls  <- st_sfc(st_linestring(rbind(c(0,0),c(0,1))),
              st_linestring(rbind(c(0,0),c(10,0))))

ptns = st_cast(ls, "POINT")

mapview(ls, color = "red") + ptns

You can also cast to MULTIPOINT if you wish.

Edit:

As mentioned by @Spacedman in the comments, this returns 4 points, because 2 separate linestrings with 2 vertices each are cast. If we want only 3 points, we need to set up the line to be a single linestring with 3 vertices:

ls = st_sfc(st_linestring(matrix(c(c(0,1),c(0,0),c(10,0)), 
                                 ncol = 2, byrow = TRUE)))

Then pnts = st_cast(ls, "POINT") will result in 3 points.

Edit 2:

If you only want the endpoints, then st_line_sample is what you are looking for:

ptns = st_line_sample(ls, sample = 1)

where sample is a numeric value between 0 and 1 (0 being the start point and 1 the endpoint).

Answer 2

If still of interest (or for those having the same question):

The package lwgeom contains the st_startpoint and st_endpoint functions that return respectively the source and target vertices of a linestring.

Answer 3

End point of each linestring:

library(sf)
library(tidyverse)

s1 <- rbind(c(0,3),c(0,4),c(1,5),c(2,5))
s2 <- rbind(c(0.2,3), c(0.2,4), c(1,4.8), c(2,4.8))
s3 <- rbind(c(0,4.4), c(0.6,5))

# LINESTRING sf object
sfls <- sapply(list(s1,s2,s3), function(x) st_linestring(x)) %>%
  st_sfc() %>%
  st_sf('geom' = .)

# break it to points
sfpts <- st_geometry(sfls) %>% 
  lapply(., function(x) {
    st_sfc(x) %>% 
      st_cast(., 'POINT')})

# subset the last point from each geometry, make a POINT sf object
sfls_ends <- sapply(sfpts, function(p) {
  p[c(length(p))]
}) %>% 
  st_sfc() %>%
  st_sf('geom' = .)

# check with
plot(sfls)
plot(sfls_ends, add = TRUE, pch = 19, col = 'red')