Understanding the working of buffer in shapely

Question

I have a linestring which I need to buffer but the problem is that I am not able to understand the unit metric in which the buffer function accepts the linestring.

Possible duplicate of geopandas/shapely: what units it uses/calculates for area and distance functions? — Hornbydd, May 17 '18 at 15:23

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 17 '18 at 14:46

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If the coordinates are in degrees, I believe the buffer unit will be as well. If you want to specify meters or feet, you need to first reproject your geometry into a CRS that uses meters or feet.

answered May 17 '18 at 14:46

Jon

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score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '18 at 15:06

From Shapely's project page:

Shapely is not concerned with data formats or coordinate systems, but can be readily integrated with packages that are.

so @Jon's answer is correct. The unit depends on the unit of your input data. You can use geopandas, pyproj or GDAL to convert your lineString to another crs.

Understanding the working of buffer in shapely

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