Basic Data Types: Lists and Tuples

Abstract

GIS scripting frequently involves manipulating collections of items, such as files or data records. For example, you might have multiple tabular data files with special characters in the fields preventing direct import into ArcGIS. A script to replace the characters can use lists to hold the file names and field names. Then the files and fields can be batch processed. Built-in Python data types, such as lists, are useful for solving this kind of GIS problem. This chapter presents the Python list data type, list operations and methods, the range function, mutability, and tuples. The chapter concludes with a debugging walk-through to demonstrate syntax checking and tracebacks.