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Geospatial data often comes in various formats, such as WKB (Well-Known Binary). To visualize these geometries, we can use Python libraries such as Shapely for geometric operations and Matplotlib for plotting. This tutorial will guide you through the process of plotting a geometry using a WKB string.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, make sure you have the following Python libraries installed:

• shapely
• matplotlib

You can install them using pip:

pip install shapely matplotlib

Step 2: Define the WKB String

We will use a WKB string that represents a polygon geometry. WKB is a binary format for representing geometric objects. Here is our example WKB string:

wkb_string = "010300000001000000050000009CD103DDE6F855C06D55F1CA1EF8444040D37DC6E6F855C08635F86F1CF8444046F21108E6F855C08635F86F1CF844401084D857E6F855C06D015FD91EF844409CD103DDE6F855C06D55F1CA1EF84440"

Step 3: Parse the WKB String

Using the Shapely library, we can parse the WKB string into a geometry object. The wkb.loads function is used to load the geometry from the WKB string:

geometry = wkb.loads(bytes.fromhex(wkb_string))

Step 4: Plot the Geometry

To visualize the geometry, we use Matplotlib. We can plot the exterior coordinates of the polygon:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(*geometry.exterior.xy)
plt.show()

Full Code

Putting it all together, here is the complete code to plot the geometry from the WKB string:

from shapely import wkb
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Define the WKB string
wkb_string = "010300000001000000050000009CD103DDE6F855C06D55F1CA1EF8444040D37DC6E6F855C08635F86F1CF8444046F21108E6F855C08635F86F1CF844401084D857E6F855C06D015FD91EF844409CD103DDE6F855C06D55F1CA1EF84440"
# Parse the WKB string into a Shapely geometry object
geometry = wkb.loads(bytes.fromhex(wkb_string))

# Plot the geometry
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(*geometry.exterior.xy)
plt.show()

Visualization

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we demonstrated how to parse a WKB string into a Shapely geometry object and plot it using Matplotlib. This method can be used to visualize various geometric objects stored in WKB format, making it a powerful tool for geospatial data analysis and visualization.

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