The toolbox is the logical place to start, but I believe you may be better suited to going with the editing tools.
There's a post here saying how you can do it in ArcGIS ten using "Topology":
http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/48073-Split-polygon-with-line-doesn-t-work
Alternately, you can probably "cheat". Use the "buffer" tool to create a one-sided buffer around the polylines. If you choose the correct side (either left or right, just experiment), and make the buffer of a thousand miles say, you'll then be able to clip erase by this new buffer and the only bit of the polygon remaining will be on the other side of the line.
One way to do this is using ddply from the plyr package:
require(plyr)
# split up captures by the unique individual id for processing
ddply(captures, "individual", function(df) {
# single captures don't have any dist/time changes
if(nrow(df)==1) {
return(data.frame(start=NA,
end=NA,
dist=NA,
mean.time=NA))
}
# for each pair of consecutive displacement, calculate dist and mean time
out <- sapply(1:(nrow(df)-1), function(i) {
d <- dist(df[i:(i+1),3:4])
t <- mean(df[i:(i+1),5])
c(d,t)
})
out <- t(out)
# reports results, adding the starting and ending record number
# for each displacement
data.frame(start=head(df$record.nbr,-1),
end=tail(df$record.nbr, -1),
dist=out[,1],
mean.time=out[,2])
})
Which results in:
individual start end dist mean.time
1 1 1 3 290.00 126.0
2 1 3 5 49710.00 127.5
3 1 5 7 50000.02 129.0
4 2 2 4 283044.47 126.5
5 2 4 8 430217.62 128.5
6 3 NA NA NA NA
The equivalent can be done using base tapply in R, however I generally find the ddply to be cleaner.
Best Answer
What I could understand from your question is that you want to get a profile from contour polylines. I dont know if a zonal mean over the contour line works for you but it is a good idea take a look Spatial Analyst Zonal tools.
And another way, Easy Profiler2.1 - Generate Profile From Contour can help you too.. you can find it in ArcScripts here.
And I want to say before forgetting, you can find more profiler under ArcScripts.
The Main Function are include:
I hope it helps you...