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I have a question regarding selections in ArcGIS. Assumed I have one layer in ArcMap and I have selected two of five features. Is it possible to get a list of all selected features by using Python? It would be fine if there is a way to get one special (or all) attribute(s) of the selected features stored in a list that can be written into a txt file.

I know that it is possible in QGIS, but is it also possible in ArcGIS?

Thanks for your help and suggestions!

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2 Answers

up vote 13 down vote accepted

Any time you have a selection on a layer a cursor object will only return the selected rows.

for row in arcpy.SearchCursor("name_of_layer_with_selection"):
    print row.field1, row.field2
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up vote 2 down vote

the Describe function will also return a list. I am not sure if this is faster than the cursor method but I have fond this to be a useful tool. The resulting list is the object id's for the selection set.

import arcpy

aa = arcpy.Describe("someFC")

ss = aa.FIDset

tt = ss.split("; ")

Print tt

[u'1363', u'1364', u'1365', u'1367', u'1369', u'1370']

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Good solution too! Sadly I am not able to set two times the green heel. This solution makes the script also independent from different ArcGIS Versions, because in ArcGIS 10.1 the cursors are called in a different way than in ArcGIs 10.0 (ArcGIS 10.1 arcpy.da.SearchCursor, ArcGIS 10.0 arcpy.SearchCursor...). – Sven Dec 31 '12 at 20:38
Both cursor types are available at 10.1. You don't have to use the new arcpy.da cursors. – blah238 Dec 31 '12 at 20:53
Ah, ok. Thanks. – Sven Dec 31 '12 at 20:58

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