Intersecting two shape problem using geopandas

Question

I'm trying to intersect two polygons based on the following link, intersecting two shapefiles from Python or command line

But problem occured that shows a "ValueError: Geometry column cannot contain mutiple geometry types when writing to file."

I'm new on these free open source GIS tool manipulation, can anyone give me some idea? My source code is like this:

    from shapely.geometry import shape,Polygon,MultiPolygon,mapping
    import geopandas as gpd

    g1 = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_file("./origin_test.shp")
    g2 = gpd.GeoDataFrame.from_file("./ref_test.shp")

    data=[]
    for index, orig in g1.iterrows():
        for index2, ref in g2.iterrows():
            if ref['geometry'].intersects(orig['geometry']):
               owdspd=orig['wdspd']
               data.append({'geometry':ref['geometry'].intersection(orig['geometry']),'wdspd':owdspd})

    data = data.set_geometry()
    df = gpd.GeoDataFrame(data,columns=['geometry','wdspd'])
    df.to_file('./intersection.shp')

Answer 1

1) The problem is that the intersection of two polygons is not always a polygon

import geopandas as gp
poly1 = gp.read_file("poly_origin.shp")
poly2 = gp.read_file("poly_test.shp")
data = []
for index, orig in poly1.iterrows():
    for index2, ref in poly2.iterrows():      
        if ref['geometry'].intersects(orig['geometry']): 
         owdspd=orig['id']
         data.append({'geometry':ref['geometry'].intersection(orig['geometry']),'wdspd':owdspd})

for geom in data: 
   print geom
{'geometry': <shapely.geometry.polygon.Polygon object at 0x10aab9c10>, 'wdspd': 1}
{'geometry': <shapely.geometry.polygon.Polygon object at 0x10aab9e50>, 'wdspd': 2}
{'geometry': <shapely.geometry.linestring.LineString object at 0x10aacc250>, 'wdspd': 3}

The result is 2 Polygons and a LineString therefore the error

"ValueError: Geometry column cannot contain mutiple geometry types when writing to file"

2) A solution is to convert all the geometries to the same type

from shapely.geometry import LineString
for i in data:
 geom = i['geometry']
 if geom.geom_type=='Polygon':
      i['geometry']=  LineString(list(geom.exterior.coords))

Now, you can convert to a GeoDataFrame

df = gp.GeoDataFrame(data,columns=['geometry','wdspd'])
df                          geometry                   wdspd
0  LINESTRING (96.42123294751703 -44.632201588700...      1
1  LINESTRING (282.773470482277 -127.548992317643...      2
2  LINESTRING (144.3726591760299 -221.86142322097...      3

3) Or to use GeoPandas Overlay

inter = gp.overlay(poly1, poly2, how='intersection')
inter
     id  id_2                geometry
 0   2     2  POLYGON ((282.773470482277 -127.5489923176438,...
 1   1     1  POLYGON ((51.0880537778328 -116.6195085418168,...

Export the result

df.to_file("linestring_intersection.shp")