Request came in last week for a way to split a line feature into 10 equal length line features.
The input looked like this
The accepted solution came from Dave on the team who sent this elegant and efficient solution.
in_fc = r'c:\projects\waterway.gdb\stream'
out_fc = r'c:\projects\waterway.gdb\stream10'
out_count = 10 # how many features desired
line = arcpy.da.SearchCursor(in_fc, ("SHAPE@",)).next()[0]
arcpy.CopyFeatures_management([line.segmentAlongLine(i/float(out_count), ((i+1)/float(out_count)), True) for i in range(0, out_count)], out_fc)
Which outpus a new feature class containing 10 line features like so
How does it work? The first 3 lines are self explanatory. So we will skip.
The following line is also fairly simple, what it does is get the geometry (shape@) of the first record (we only ask for next() once). The [0] is needed to get just the first value in the record (remember cursors return lists of values).
polyline = arcpy.da.SearchCursor(in_fc, ("SHAPE@",)).next()[0]
Next is where the magic happens, python list comprehension is used to turn the polyline object into a list of 10 (as per the out_count variable) equal length segments generated by the segmentAlongLine function. This list of polyline is then used as input to CopyFeatures (as per Using geometry objects with geoprocessing tools) which writes out the 10 polyline as individual features into the output feature class (out_fc).
arcpy.CopyFeatures_management([polyline.segmentAlongLine(i/float(out_count), ((i+1)/float(out_count)), True) for i in range(0, out_count)], out_fc)
EDIT: As was pointed out in the comments, the segmentAlongLine is new at 10.3.
Cheers
ArcPy Café 