I have a polyline layer of rivers in England (one line, only attribute is length), and I need to divide it into regions so that I can work out the length of rivers in each region (the green bit is the line layer in the picture.
Is there a way to clip the line by the polygon layer, so that it creates one line per region? (a multi-part feature is fine)
Just to add – I've tried the clip tool, but it just clips to the outline of the whole polygon layer – so doesn't split up the regions…
Best Answer
Use the Intersect tool.
The Intersect tool takes the input features (your lines) and intersects them with your intersect features (your polygons) and outputs based on those polygon boundaries.
Also see How Intersect Works
Example: In ArcMap I draw a handful of polygons, and some lines that crossed through them all. I then ran the Intersect tool using the following settings:
And the result, with all lines split at boundaries: