Question

I see that the following syntax is used in examples:

GeomFromText('Polygon((1 1, 2 2, 3 3))');

The double parenthesis caused a bit of a trouble so I decided to look it up in the official documentation. At my non-small surprise the search mysql polygon did not give me the documentation of this function. A search to mysql geomfromtext also did not give the definition of the function GeomFromText.

So I’m still looking for the official documentation of these functions.

Answer 1

I see that the MySQL Reference Manual for GeomFromText() doesn’t even give a typical function definition either, but it does describe how to use it. GeomFromText() converts from “well-known text” (abbreviated as WKT) to MySQL’s internal format. WKT is simply a textual representation of a geometry object, which can be a polygon as your example, or any of the other geometry types. A key point to understand is that Polygon(...) is the WKT format for a polygon; it isn’t a MySQL function call, even though it sort of looks like one.

Polygons can contain holes. When defining a polygon, you may optionally supply one or more interior boundaries to define such holes. The WKT for polygons use inner parentheses to distinguish these boundaries from one other. Even if you don’t want to define holes, the inner parentheses are still required. Wikipedia provides some simple examples of polygon WKTs together with pictures of the resulting polygons.