How to call geom.Polygonize() with OGR?

Question

The Python documentation for OGR lists a Polygonize() method belonging to the Geometry class, as does the C documentation. The docstring suggests it can be called on a geometry object of type "MultiLinestring", however doing so results in an AttributeError. Other methods such as Buffer() work fine.

Did they move or remove this in GDAL 2.x? Lib/site-packages/osgeo/ogr.py does not contain a Polygonize() function. It does say "OGR 1.9.0" in the documentation, but I would assume this normally means OGR >= 1.9.0.

Currently running gdal version 2.2.4.

Code sample:

multiline = ogr.Geometry(ogr.wkbMultiLineString)
multiline.AddGeometry(line)

polygon = multiline.Polygonize()

Results in:

AttributeError: type object 'object' has no attribute '__getattr__'

Answer 1

The Polygonize method is not available in the python bindings in GDAL 2.2.4. Although it has been around in the core C++ library since GDAL 1.9.0), it was only exposed in the python bindings at GDAL 2.3 (relevant commit).

However, a workaround is to use the ogr.BuildPolygonFromEdges method:

from osgeo import ogr
ogr.UseExceptions()

wkt = """LINESTRING(148.479859015579 -30.082172000762046,150.545288703079 -29.58660013074214,150.896851203079 -31.479043224714392,148.699585578079 -31.815735504845552,148.479859015579 -30.082172000762046)"""

line = ogr.CreateGeometryFromWkt(wkt)
multiline = ogr.Geometry(ogr.wkbMultiLineString)
multiline.AddGeometry(line)

polygon = ogr.BuildPolygonFromEdges(multiline)

print(polygon.ExportToWkt())

Outputs:

POLYGON ((148.479859015579 -30.082172000762,150.545288703079 -29.5866001307421,150.896851203079 -31.4790432247144,148.699585578079 -31.8157355048456,148.479859015579 -30.082172000762))

If you need the GEOS based Polygonize method, either use fiona and shapely or upgrade to gdal 2.3.