What is the difference between an H3 index and an S2 cell ID?

H3 uses a hierarchical hexagonal grid across 16 resolutions, whereas S2 projects Earth onto a cube subdivided using a Hilbert space-filling quadtree curve up to level 30.

What does round-trip drift measure?

Round-trip drift measures the geographic distance in meters between original coordinates and the cell center after converting between H3 and S2 indexing schemes.

How does k-ring cell compaction work?

Compaction replaces groups of fully contained child cells within a k-ring disk with their common parent cell at a lower resolution to reduce total index count.

An S2 token is a hexadecimal string representation of the 64-bit S2 cell ID with trailing zeros stripped for compact storage.

Can I inspect higher-level parent cells for H3?

Yes, the tool outputs the parent ladder from resolution 0 base cells down to your target H3 resolution.

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H3 and S2 Hexagonal Cell Index Encoder and Neighbor Bridge

Encode lat/lng into Uber H3 hexagons (res 0-15) and Google S2 Hilbert cells (level 1-30) with index, id, token, quadkey, areas, k-ring neighbors, compaction, parent ladders and round-trip drift.

Details

What this tool helps you do

Enter a coordinate, an H3 resolution (0-15) and an S2 level (1-30). The tool computes the Uber H3 index (base cell, center, boundary-derived area and max edge, parent ladder, gridDisk k-ring with optional compactCells compaction) and the Google S2 cell (Hilbert quadkey face/digits, exact 64-bit BigInt cell id, trimmed token, center, the four same-face quadtree neighbors), then bridges the systems: size-matched Web-Mercator/Bing quadkey, H3→S2 and S2→H3 conversions through cell centers, and round-trip drift in meters so you can see the quantization cost of switching systems.

Execution

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Samples

H3 and S2 Hexagonal Cell Index Encoder and Neighbor Bridge

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Key facts

Overview

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Use cases

Examples

1. San Francisco Urban Grid Resolution and Bridge Analysis

2. Continental Data Partitioning and Base Cell Mapping

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