Calculate angle (clockwise) between two points

A verified 0° to 360° solution

It is an old thread, but for me the other solutions didn't work well, so I implemented my own version.

My function will return a number between 0 and 360 (excluding 360) for two points on the screen (i.e. 'y' starts at the top and increasing towards the bottom), where results are as in a compass, 0° at the top, increasing clockwise:

def angle_between_points(p1, p2):
    d1 = p2[0] - p1[0]
    d2 = p2[1] - p1[1]
    if d1 == 0:
        if d2 == 0:  # same points?
            deg = 0
        else:
            deg = 0 if p1[1] > p2[1] else 180
    elif d2 == 0:
        deg = 90 if p1[0] < p2[0] else 270
    else:
        deg = math.atan(d2 / d1) / pi * 180
        lowering = p1[1] < p2[1]
        if (lowering and deg < 0) or (not lowering and deg > 0):
            deg += 270
        else:
            deg += 90
    return deg

Numpy's arctan2(y, x) will compute the counterclockwise angle (a value in radians between -π and π) between the origin and the point (x, y).

You could do this for your points A and B, then subtract the second angle from the first to get the signed clockwise angular difference. This difference will be between -2π and 2π, so in order to get a positive angle between 0 and 2π you could then take the modulo against 2π. Finally you can convert radians to degrees using np.rad2deg.

import numpy as np

def angle_between(p1, p2):
    ang1 = np.arctan2(*p1[::-1])
    ang2 = np.arctan2(*p2[::-1])
    return np.rad2deg((ang1 - ang2) % (2 * np.pi))

For example:

A = (1, 0)
B = (1, -1)

print(angle_between(A, B))
# 45.

print(angle_between(B, A))
# 315.

If you don't want to use numpy, you could use math.atan2 in place of np.arctan2, and use math.degrees (or just multiply by 180 / math.pi) in order to convert from radians to degrees. One advantage of the numpy version is that you can also pass two (2, ...) arrays for p1 and p2 in order to compute the angles between multiple pairs of points in a vectorized way.

Use the inner product and the determinant of the two vectors. This is really what you should understand if you want to understand how this works. You'll need to know/read about vector math to understand.

See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot_product and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Determinant

from math import acos
from math import sqrt
from math import pi

def length(v):
    return sqrt(v[0]**2+v[1]**2)
def dot_product(v,w):
   return v[0]*w[0]+v[1]*w[1]
def determinant(v,w):
   return v[0]*w[1]-v[1]*w[0]
def inner_angle(v,w):
   cosx=dot_product(v,w)/(length(v)*length(w))
   rad=acos(cosx) # in radians
   return rad*180/pi # returns degrees
def angle_clockwise(A, B):
    inner=inner_angle(A,B)
    det = determinant(A,B)
    if det<0: #this is a property of the det. If the det < 0 then B is clockwise of A
        return inner
    else: # if the det > 0 then A is immediately clockwise of B
        return 360-inner

In the determinant computation, you're concatenating the two vectors to form a 2 x 2 matrix, for which you're computing the determinant.

Here's a solution that doesn't require cmath.

import math

class Vector:
    def __init__(self, x, y):
        self.x = x
        self.y = y

v1 = Vector(0, 1)
v2 = Vector(0, -1)

v1_theta = math.atan2(v1.y, v1.x)
v2_theta = math.atan2(v2.y, v2.x)

r = (v2_theta - v1_theta) * (180.0 / math.pi)

if r < 0:
    r += 360.0

print r