Reading and Writing with Cursors

Abstract

Batch processing can be extended to work with individual records within GIS data tables. Previous chapters listed fields in multiple files within nested directories; this chapter adds another dimension to data exploration. Each data table is made of records, the rows of values in the attribute table, which can also be listed within a script. Though the term ‘records’ may be more familiar to database users, we’ll use the term ‘rows’ to refer to data records for consistency with the arcpy documentation. Cursors and file input/output techniques, enable reading and writing individual rows within data tables. The focus of this chapter is arcpy cursor functions, which work with the rows in Esri attribute tables, such as feature class tables.