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I am trying to batch process the conversion of shapefiles to rasters. I am stuck on how to specify the name for each output raster file. Part of the trick is that my input shapefiles are the names of frogs in "genus_species" format and go over the 13 character requirement of rasters.

For example, here are the names of my first two shapefiles: Acris_crepitans.shp Anaxyrus_americanus.shp

I would like the output rasters to be as follows (i.e., the first two letters of the genus, underscore, and then however many remaining characters can fit for the species): Ac_crepitans An_americanus

Here is my code thus far (it's probably horrible b/c I'm new to Python):

********************************************************************************
# Import arcpy module
import arcpy
from arcpy import env

#Set working environment
env.workspace = "C:\\GIS_data\\Frog_shps"
Dir = env.workspace

#List FCs
fcList = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses() 

# Loop
for fc in fcList:

  output = Dir + "\\" + [here is where I am stuck]

# Process: Polygon to Raster
arcpy.FeatureToRaster_conversion(fc, "BINOMIAL", output, 1000) 
print "finished polygon to raster"

********************************************************************************
share|improve this question
    
You probably have a reason to use ESRI GRIDs, but if you save to .tif format, you can bypass the name length restriction. –  phloem Jan 27 at 19:05
    
There's nothing horrible with your code - it's great to see you explain where you are stuck using a code snippet rather than a Python application. –  PolyGeo♦ Jan 27 at 22:50

1 Answer 1

up vote 3 down vote accepted

Not very elegant but this should work: 

output = Dir + "\\" + (fc[:2]+"_"+fc.split("_")[1][:-4])[:13]

By the way, not sure if there was an indentation issue when you pasted the code in GIS.SE, but the for loop should be something like: 

# Loop
for fc in fcList:
  output = Dir + "\\" + (fc[:2]+"_"+fc.split("_")[1][:-4])[:13]

  # Process: Polygon to Raster
  arcpy.FeatureToRaster_conversion(fc, "BINOMIAL", output, 1000) 
  print "finished polygon to raster"

That is, the last 3 lines of the script should be inside the for loop.

share|improve this answer
    
This worked perfectly! –  Sarah H. Jan 27 at 20:41
    
@SarahH. Great! Please consider upvoting (yes, not only marking it as accepted :D) the answer if you consider it to be useful. –  gcarrillo Jan 27 at 20:48

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