arcpy - Joel McCune

ArcGIS Pro Ensure Minimum Version in Python

Functionality is continually added to ArcGIS Pro. When creating Python scripts taking advantage of new functionality, it is helpful to be able to check the version to either use an alternative method, or at least provide an error message informing the end user of needing to upgrade. Fortunately, ArcPy provides

Python

ArcPy Describe <dot> Properties

A tremendous amount of information is available through arcpy.Describe. Until ArcGIS Pro 2.8 though, figuring out what properties were available for the object you had just described required digging into the documentation pretty deep. Now, it is much easier to access these properties introspectively as a dictionary. Since

Python

Cloning ArcGIS Conda Environments

ArcGIS Pro, when initially released, included an incredibly powerful capability, the included Python environment is a Conda environment. This unlocks the extremely powerful and vast universe of installable packages available through Conda. Further, using Conda environments enables ensuring a project can be successfully moved to another machine, and successfully run

Python

Relative Module Imports in an ArcGIS Python Toolbox

The idea of ArcGIS Python toolboxes really appeals to me. I really like them. As is frequently the case in life, the devil is in the details. Python Toolboxes have plenty of interesting personality quirks. Among these is relative module imports when creating Python Toolboxes for ArcGIS Pro. Here is

Python

Purge Scratch GeoDatabase

In a lot of the scripts I write, especially data preparation pipelines, I use the scratch Geodatabase - a lot. At the end of these pipelines, especially when testing and re-running the processes multiple times, I like to clean out this workspace to ensure my results are the new results,

arcpy

Use ArcPy to Match Spatial Reference

Frequently when performing data preparation or analysis in GIS the spatial reference or projections need to be modified to match. Also, much of the time the data needs to be modified to match one specific feature class. The difficulty lies in frequently also needing to select a transformation if the

ArcGIS

ArcGIS Python Reproject Geometry Object List

Frequently I have a large list of geometry objects I need to get reprojected for analysis. A while back I discovered the reprojectAs method of the arcpy.Geometry object. While useful, I still needed a way to handle a few edge cases to make a more universal way to reproject.

Pandas

ArcGIS to Pandas Data Frame v2.0

One of the most popular posts on my blog discusses loading data from an ArcGIS table, either spatial (a Feature Class) or even nonspatial, to a Pandas DataFrame to take advantage of the powerful data analysis tools available in Python, such as SciKit-Learn or Keras paired with TensorFlow. This previous

Python

ArcPy Field Name List

Frequently, especially when using cursors, I need to quickly get a list of field names not including the ObjectID nor Geometry fields. I accomplish this by using a quick shorthand function. fields_list = lambda feature_class: [field.name for field in arcpy.ListFields(feature_class) if field.type != 'Geometry' and

Python

ArcGIS to Pandas Data Frame

With the release of ArcGIS 10.4, a few packages included have come to my attention. While numpy has been in there for quite some time, now scipy and pandas are now included. GIS data scientists the world over are rejoicing. While I am still a bit out from starting

arcpy

Testing Regular Expressions

Extracting pieces of text out of larger strings based on patterns, this is what regular expression matching facilitates. It really is great stuff...once you wrap your head around it. Most frequently I use regular expression matching in Python, trying to create categorized datasets by extracting values from long strings

arcpy

Automatically Find and Log All Broken Layers in Multiple Maps

Last week while teaching a Python class a student asked about a logical workflow, finding all maps with broken layers under a parent directory and reporting the results. Ideally this could be set up as a scheduled task and the results either written to a log file or better yet,

arcpy

Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

First and foremost, I have to concede, Packt Publishing recently provided a copy of Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook to review. Packt provided a copy free of change in exchange for a review on my website. To their credit, there were no expectations or strings attached. I can

ArcGIS

Create List of Unique Table Values using Data Access Module

A while back I posted a slightly more verbose solution for this. Since then two things have changed. First, I have used Python a LOT more and understand how to use sets, lists and functions a little better. Second, the data access module has been added to ArcPy. The data