polygons from coordinates

Question

I've got a data.frame with lats and lngs that define the boundaries of rectangular boxes, like so

  geohash north_lat south_lat  east_lng  west_lng
1   gbsuv  48.69141  48.64746 -4.306641 -4.350586
2   gbsuy  48.69141  48.64746 -4.262695 -4.306641

What's the easiest way to convert this into an sf object that holds a column of POLYGONs?

Answer 1

The key to creating polygons is that the coordinates have to be in sequence to form a closed area (i.e., the last point is the same as the first point).

So your data will need a bit of manipulation to create the coordinates, and put them in order. In my example I've done this with an lapply

Then the rest can be taken from the sf examples

lst <- lapply(1:nrow(df), function(x){
  ## create a matrix of coordinates that also 'close' the polygon
  res <- matrix(c(df[x, 'north_lat'], df[x, 'west_lng'],
           df[x, 'north_lat'], df[x, 'east_lng'],
           df[x, 'south_lat'], df[x, 'east_lng'],
           df[x, 'south_lat'], df[x, 'west_lng'],
           df[x, 'north_lat'], df[x, 'west_lng'])  ## need to close the polygon
         , ncol =2, byrow = T
  )
  ## create polygon objects
  st_polygon(list(res))

})

## st_sfc : creates simple features collection
## st_sf : creates simple feature object
sfdf <- st_sf(geohash = df[, 'geohash'], st_sfc(lst))

sfdf
# Simple feature collection with 2 features and 1 field
# geometry type:  POLYGON
# dimension:      XY
# bbox:           xmin: 48.64746 ymin: -4.350586 xmax: 48.69141 ymax: -4.262695
# epsg (SRID):    NA
# proj4string:    NA
# geohash                    st_sfc.lst.
# 1   gbsuv POLYGON((48.69141 -4.350586...
# 2   gbsuy POLYGON((48.69141 -4.306641...

plot(sfdf)