Programming ArcGIS with Python Cookbook, Second Edition

Chapter 8. Using the ArcPy Data Access Module with Feature Classes and Tables

In this chapter, we will cover the following recipes:

• Retrieving features from a feature class with SearchCursor
• Filtering records with a where clause
• Improving cursor performance with geometry tokens
• Inserting rows with InsertCursor
• Updating rows with UpdateCursor
• Deleting rows with UpdateCursor
• Inserting and updating rows inside an edit session
• Reading geometry from a feature class
• Using Walk() to navigate directories

Introduction

We'll start this chapter with a basic question. What are cursors? Cursors are in-memory objects containing one or more rows of data from a table or feature class. Each row contains attributes from each field in a data source along with the geometry ...