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Swift Anytime
Swift Anytime

Posted on • Updated on • Originally published at swiftanytime.com

How to convert Degrees to Radians

When working with rotating view animations or 2d/3d games, you would have to eventually deal with degrees and radians at some point.

Even though, most people have a better understanding of degrees over radians, most of the angles are dealt in radians in Swift [and general math as a matter of fact].
Before diving into the coding path, let’s get the math part clear.

1 pi radian = 180 degrees

Note: pi = 3.14

Thus, for converting degrees to radians, you have to multiply it by pi and divide by 180.

Radians = Degrees * π / 180

Computed Property Extension

One of the easy, clean and efficient way to convert degrees to radians is to extend a computed property to BinaryFloatingPoint which is basically a generic type which includes all the decimal numeric types - Float, Double.

extension BinaryFloatingPoint {
    var radians : Self {
        return self * .pi / 180
   }
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Usage:

let degree : Float = 360 // 360 degrees
let radians = degree.radians // 6.28 radians // 2π radians 
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Extension Methods

Another convenient way of converting degrees to radians using a method over BinaryFloatingPoint, Double and Float.

extension BinaryFloatingPoint {
    func inRadians() -> Self {
        return self * .pi / 180
    }
}
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Usage:

let degrees : Float = 360 // 360 degrees
let radians = degrees.inRadians() // π radians
print(radians)
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This above method works for decimal based data types. In the case, the degrees variable is an integer, you can try the following method for converting it to radians.

// prints 6.283185 in console
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This works! Congratulations! You have successfully converted degrees to radians.

In a similar way we have an exercise for you, if you are looking forward to convert radians into degrees, then give it a try yourself and share it with us on Twitter @swiftanytime. Till then,

Eat. Sleep. Swift Anytime. Repeat.

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