Check if a geopoint with latitude and longitude is within a shapefile

Question

How can I check if a geopoint is within the area of a given shapefile?

I managed to load a shapefile in python, but can't get any further.

Answer 1

Another option is to use Shapely (a Python library based on GEOS, the engine for PostGIS) and Fiona (which is basically for reading/writing files):

import fiona
import shapely

with fiona.open("path/to/shapefile.shp") as fiona_collection:

    # In this case, we'll assume the shapefile only has one record/layer (e.g., the shapefile
    # is just for the borders of a single country, etc.).
    shapefile_record = fiona_collection.next()

    # Use Shapely to create the polygon
    shape = shapely.geometry.asShape( shapefile_record['geometry'] )

    point = shapely.geometry.Point(32.398516, -39.754028) # longitude, latitude

    # Alternative: if point.within(shape)
    if shape.contains(point):
        print "Found shape for point."

Note that doing point-in-polygon tests can be expensive if the polygon is large/complicated (e.g., shapefiles for some countries with extremely irregular coastlines). In some cases it can help to use bounding boxes to quickly rule things out before doing the more intensive test:

minx, miny, maxx, maxy = shape.bounds
bounding_box = shapely.geometry.box(minx, miny, maxx, maxy)

if bounding_box.contains(point):
    ...

Lastly, keep in mind that it takes some time to load and parse large/irregular shapefiles (unfortunately, those types of polygons are often expensive to keep in memory, too).