Calculating the overlap distance of two 1D line segments?

Question

Trying to build a function that will return the total overlapping distance between 2 line segments, denoted by start and end ints. Currently I have this: That I got off the internet somewhere,  def overlap(min1, max1, min2, max2):   """returns the overlap between two lines that are 1D"""   result = None   if min1 >= max2 or min2 >= max1: result = 0   elif min1 <= min2:    result = max1 - min2   else: result = max2 - min1   return result This works however for the case of 0 100, 0,20 it returns 100. And that's clearly wrong. Is there a simple way of calculating this that will return the correct values?

Answer 1

I don't know Python, so I'll give this in psuedo-code. You can just replace "if min1 <= min2: result = max1 - min2 else: result = max2 - min1 " with something to the effect that result = smaller of (max1,max2) - larger of (min1,min2).

That will work because what you're looking for is the magnitude of the intersection of the two line segments.