Python - Joel McCune

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

Python Dictionary as Object

It's something simple enough, I just want to take a dictionary and have the ablity to access the properties using dot syntax. Consider, if I have a dictionary such as the following... my_dict = { 'one_value': 'something sweet', 'two_value': 'something even sweeter', 'nested_value': { 'n1': 'buried value', 'n2': 'another

Python

Conda and ArcGIS Pro 2.7

For those of us who regularly work with Python and ArcGIS, especially for data science, life just got a lot easier with ArcGIS Pro 2.7. Now, arcpy can be installed just like any other Conda package. This means ArcGIS Pro now can coexist on the same machine and play nicely with Conda.

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

Create `arcgis` Conda Environment with a Batch File

Although first and foremost a Geographer, after transitioning to the GeoAI Business Development Team at Esri, now I spend most of my time in Jupyter Lab. Although not altogther difficult, if following best practices, when installing other packages and modifying the primary Conda environment shipped with ArcGIS Pro, arcgispro-py3, you

Python

Automatically Convert to Esri Spatially Enabled Dataframe

I frequnetly need a Spatially Enabled Dataframe from a variety of sources, and these sources frequently change. Guessing there is a very good chance I am not the only one doing this - here is my solution to this as a Gist you are more than welcome to use.

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

Python

Creating a SpatialDataFrame from a Web GIS Item

The relatively recent addition of the SpatialDataFrame object to the ArcGIS Python API was a gigantic leap forward. The SpatialDataFrame marries the common data structure used for data munging and data science, the Pandas DataFrame, with ArcGIS in a familiar (for data scientists at least) and user friendly environment, Jupyter

Python

Keeping the ArcGIS Python API with ArcGIS Pro Current

If you are running the ArcGIS Python API in a virgin Conda environment, this very likely does not apply to you. If you are running the ArcGIS Python API in the Python environment installed with ArcGIS Pro, as of today 05Mar2018, you are stuck at version 1.2.5 while

Pandas

Filter NotNull Geometries in an ArcGIS SpatialDataFrame

When working with Pandas DataFrames it is fairly common to filter out records with null values using the notnull Pandas function. This however, does not work with the geometry column created when loading data into a SpatialDataFrame. It still has a value, albeit an invalid value, but Pandas still sees

Python

PyCharm Debugging - Stop on Unhandled Exceptions

One of the most useful features of PyCharm is the robust debugging capabilities, especially the ability to set it to stop during debugging when encountering an unhandled exception. Enabling this, I frequently have to remember how to enable it on my machine. It is not altogether difficult - just not

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.

Conda

ArcGIS Pro + Conda + Jupyter Notebook + ArcGIS Python API

ArcGIS Pro, like it's predecessor ArcMap, installs Python tightly integrated with the software. ArcGIS Pro 1.4 installs Python 3.5 complete with the Conda package management system. The environment ArcGIS Pro uses is actually even a Conda environment named arcgispro-py3. This means it is not very difficult at all

Python

ArcGIS Chunk Data for Analysis Using Python

Frequently I have to process very large datasets so large my computer with a quad core i7 with 20GB of RAM cannot handle it. The solution is to chunk the analysis. While there are multiple ways to accomplish this, since ArcGIS Geoprocessing tools honor selections, the analysis can be chunked

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

Displaying Matplotlib Graphs Inline in Jupyter Notebook

Updated to include how to modify the config file so this is the default behavior. Recently I have begun to try, at least at a cursory level, to begin to understand some of the world of machine learning. Since I already know Python, doing this in Python seemed a good

Python

ArcGIS + Python + Jupyter Notebook = Win!

One of my favorite tools when working with Python and exploring how things work is Jupyter Notebook. Jupyter Notebook however, is not included with the ArcGIS installation of Python. Until the 1.3 release of ArcGIS Pro, there really was no practical way to install packages to get Jupyter Notebook

Python

Getting Started with Conda and ArcGIS Pro 1.3

Python is an incredible tool for streamlining workflows and doing analysis with ArcGIS. However, until now it was frustratingly difficult, or practically impossible to take advantage of the plethora of packages available to streamline workflows, and make life much easier for scripting. With ArcGIS Pro 1.3 comes the ability

Python

Python IDE Configuration with ArcGIS Pro 1.3

In previous versions of ArcGIS Pro, 1.2 and earlier, to use arcpy, the ArcGIS module for Python, in external scripts, you had to perform a secondary installation. A really handy feature of ArcGIS Pro is autoupdating. When prompted to update Pro from version 1.2 to 1.3, I

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

Python

Installing Python Packages on an ArcGIS Python Installation

It is little secret I use a ton of Python to get tasks in ArcGIS done. If serious about getting volumes of data processed with ArcGIS, Python is far and above the way to get things done quickly. If you start venturing far into this world, you will discover a

beer

Beer Me - The Beer Map Download Tool

After unleasing the Brewery Finder on the world yesterday, a lot of people have been asking about the data source. Since I actually wrote a script to get the data and convert it, rather than force anybody who wants to do the same to recreate the wheel, I decided to