Distance formula between two points in a list

Question

I need to take a list I have created and find the closest two points and print them out. How can I go about comparing each point in the list?

There isn\'t any need to pl

Answer 1

This might work:

oInput = ["9.5 7.5", "10.2 19.1", "9.7 10.2"]

# parse inputs
inp = [(float(j[0]), float(j[1])) for j in [i.split() for i in oInput]]

# initialize results with a really large value
min_distance = float('infinity')
min_pair = None

# loop over inputs
length = len(inp)
for i in xrange(length):
    for j in xrange(i+1, length):
        point1 = inp[i]
        point2 = inp[j]

        if math.hypot(point1[0] - point2[0], point1[1] - point2[0]) < min_distance:
            min_pair = [point1, point2]

once the loops are done, min_pair should be the pair with the smallest distance.

Using float() to parse the text leaves room for improvement.

math.hypot is about a third faster than calculating the distance in a handwritten python-function