Looking for a pythonic way to calculate the length of a WKT linestring
The geopy module provides the Vincenty formula, which provides accurate ellipsoid distances. Couple this with the wkt
loading in Shapely, and you have reasonably simple code:
from geopy import distance
from shapely.wkt import loads
line_wkt="LINESTRING(3.0 4.0, 3.1 4.1)"
# a number of other elipsoids are supported
distance.VincentyDistance.ELLIPSOID = 'WGS-84'
d = distance.distance
line = loads(line_wkt)
# convert the coordinates to xy array elements, compute the distance
dist = d(line.xy[0], line.xy[1])
print dist.meters
You could also use Shapely's length property, i.e.:
from shapely.wkt import loads
l=loads('LINESTRING(3.0 4.0, 3.1 4.1)')
print l.length
I'd use ogr2ogr (http://www.gdal.org/ogr/index.html) to do it directly but if you really must use python then there are python bindings (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/GDAL/) to let you do it.