How can you determine a point is between two other points on a line segment?
Check if the cross product of (b-a) and (c-a) is 0, as tells Darius Bacon, tells you if the points a, b and c are aligned.
But, as you want to know if c is between a and b, you also have to check that the dot product of (b-a) and (c-a) is positive and is less than the square of the distance between a and b.
In non-optimized pseudocode:
def isBetween(a, b, c): crossproduct = (c.y - a.y) * (b.x - a.x) - (c.x - a.x) * (b.y - a.y) # compare versus epsilon for floating point values, or != 0 if using integers if abs(crossproduct) > epsilon: return False dotproduct = (c.x - a.x) * (b.x - a.x) + (c.y - a.y)*(b.y - a.y) if dotproduct < 0: return False squaredlengthba = (b.x - a.x)*(b.x - a.x) + (b.y - a.y)*(b.y - a.y) if dotproduct > squaredlengthba: return False return True
Check if the cross product of b-a
and c-a
is0
: that means all the points are collinear. If they are, check if c
's coordinates are between a
's and b
's. Use either the x or the y coordinates, as long as a
and b
are separate on that axis (or they're the same on both).
def is_on(a, b, c): "Return true iff point c intersects the line segment from a to b." # (or the degenerate case that all 3 points are coincident) return (collinear(a, b, c) and (within(a.x, c.x, b.x) if a.x != b.x else within(a.y, c.y, b.y)))def collinear(a, b, c): "Return true iff a, b, and c all lie on the same line." return (b.x - a.x) * (c.y - a.y) == (c.x - a.x) * (b.y - a.y)def within(p, q, r): "Return true iff q is between p and r (inclusive)." return p <= q <= r or r <= q <= p
This answer used to be a mess of three updates. The worthwhile info from them: Brian Hayes's chapter in Beautiful Code covers the design space for a collinearity-test function -- useful background. Vincent's answer helped to improve this one. And it was Hayes who suggested testing only one of the x or the y coordinates; originally the code had and
in place of if a.x != b.x else
.