Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By : Joel Lawhead
Book Image

QGIS Python Programming Cookbook, Second Edition - Second Edition

By: Joel Lawhead

Overview of this book

QGIS is a desktop geographic information system that facilitates data viewing, editing, and analysis. Paired with the most efficient scripting language—Python, we can write effective scripts that extend the core functionality of QGIS. Based on version QGIS 2.18, this book will teach you how to write Python code that works with spatial data to automate geoprocessing tasks in QGIS. It will cover topics such as querying and editing vector data and using raster data. You will also learn to create, edit, and optimize a vector layer for faster queries, reproject a vector layer, reduce the number of vertices in a vector layer without losing critical data, and convert a raster to a vector. Following this, you will work through recipes that will help you compose static maps, create heavily customized maps, and add specialized labels and annotations. As well as this, we’ll also share a few tips and tricks based on different aspects of QGIS.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
QGIS Python Programming Cookbook - Second Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Generating points along a line


You can generate points within a polygon fairly simply using a point in polygon method. But sometimes, you may want to generate points along a line. You can randomly place points inside the polygon's extent, which is essentially just a rectangular polygon, or you can place points at random locations along the line as random distances. In this recipe, we'll demonstrate both of these methods.

Getting ready

You will need to download the following zipped shapefile and place it in a directory named shapes in your qgis_data directory:

https://github.com/GeospatialPython/Learn/raw/master/path.zip

How to do it...

First, we will generate random points along a line using a grass function in the Processing Toolbox. We'll then generate points within the line's extent using a native QGIS processing function:

  1. First, we need to import the processing module:

            import processing 
    
  2. Then, we'll load the line layer onto the map:

            line = QgsVectorLayer("/qgis_data/shapes...