Calculating the angle between two lines without having to calculate the slope? (Java)

Question

I have two Lines: L1 and L2. I want to calculate the angle between the two lines. L1 has points: {(x1, y1), (x2, y2)} and L2 has points: {(x3, y3), (x4, y

Answer 1

Dot product is probably more useful in this case. Here you can find a geometry package for Java which provides some useful helpers. Below is their calculation for determining the angle between two 3-d points. Hopefully it will get you started:

public static double computeAngle (double[] p0, double[] p1, double[] p2)
{
  double[] v0 = Geometry.createVector (p0, p1);
  double[] v1 = Geometry.createVector (p0, p2);

  double dotProduct = Geometry.computeDotProduct (v0, v1);

  double length1 = Geometry.length (v0);
  double length2 = Geometry.length (v1);

  double denominator = length1 * length2;

  double product = denominator != 0.0 ? dotProduct / denominator : 0.0;

  double angle = Math.acos (product);

  return angle;
}

Good luck!