What I have:
an excel file with the names of properties within an area that is part of the PLSS in which Township/Range, Section and Lot numbers are used. The file contains a legal description for every property. Here are some examples of the individual legal descriptions:
NW/2 SW/2 – meaning the Northwest half of the Southwest half of a given section.
Lots 1,2,3,4 – meaning lots numbered 1-4 of a given section.
E/2 – meaning the Eastern half of a given section.
The excel data contains these fields.
Township_Range, Section, Legal_Description, Property_Name
I also have the Townships/Range, Sections and Lots as separate feature classes.
What I want to do:
I would like to write a script that goes through the excel table and adds features to a feature class based on the legal descriptions of every property. I feel like this could be done by selecting the appropriate lots(divisions of each section) use arcpy.copy and append to the new feature class. However, the problem lies in creating a good way to select lots based on legal descriptions alone. There are no fields within the lot feature class that provide a legal description.
after using a search cursor to narrow down the specific twp_rng and section,
It would somehow have to work like so…
if LEGAL_DESC == "E/2":
select the lots that lie in the eastern half of the section #How?
copy selection
append to new feature class
Obviously, this is a pretty dirty and could be optimized by having the legal description as an object instead of writing a separate "if" statement for each possible scenario, but that's not what i'm worried about. The logic of how to select the correct portion of lots is the problem.
Anyone have any neat ideas??
Best Answer
Here is what I've come up with so far that seems to be doing the job I intended it to do.