Your question is not precise enough. An array of points is only « clockwise » or « anti-clockwise » relative to a reference point. Otherwise, any array of three points can always be either CW or CCW. See the following picture: on the left, the points are ordered clockwise; on the right, the exact same points are ordered anticlockwise.
In your case, I believe using the barycenter of the points as a reference point is reasonable.
A good method for an unknown number of points could be the following one:
- let
P[0], P[1], ... P[n-1]
be the list of points to sort - let M be the barycenter of all points
- compute
a[0], a[1], ... a[n-1]
such thata[i] = atan2(P[i].y - M.y, P[i].x - M.x);
- sort points relative to their
a
value, usingqsort
for instance.
However, you can be sure that a good sorting algorithm will perform poorly with three input values compared to an ad-hoc method. Using atan2
is still valid, but just don't use qsort
.