Mapping Toolbox™

ispolycw - True if polygon vertices are in clockwise order

Syntax

tf = ispolycw(x, y)

Description

tf = ispolycw(x, y) returns true if the polygonal contour vertices represented by x and y are ordered in the clockwise direction. x and y are numeric vectors with the same number of elements.

Alternatively, x and y can contain multiple contours, either in NaN-separated vector form or in cell array form. In that case, ispolycw returns a logical array containing one true or false value per contour.

ispolycw always returns true for polygonal contours containing two or fewer vertices.

Vertex ordering is not well defined for self-intersecting polygonal contours. For such contours, ispolycw returns a result based on the order or vertices immediately before and after the left-most of the lowest vertices. In other words, of the vertices with the lowest y value, find the vertex with the lowest x value. For a few special cases of self-intersecting contours, the vertex ordering cannot be determined using only the left-most of the lowest vertices; for these cases, ispolycw uses a signed area test to determine the ordering.

Class Support

x and y may be any numeric class.

Example

Orientation of a square:

x = [0 1 1 0 0];
y = [0 0 1 1 0];
ispolycw(x, y)                     % Returns 0
ispolycw(fliplr(x), fliplr(y))     % Returns 1

See Also

poly2cw, poly2ccw, polybool

ismapped

isShapeMultipart