Built-in ArcPy functions

ArcPy has many built-in functions to help with geoprocessing. ArcPy functions look like geoprocessing tools in the way they are written. When you wrote the code to create a selection feature class in the previous exercise, you wrote arcpy.analysis.Select(in_features, out_features, {where_clause}). By encasing the input features, output features, and where clause in parentheses, you were calling the function and passing to it those parameters.

That is all a function is: a bundle of code that contains instructions for how to process the data you send it.

ArcPy has functions to assist with things such as the environment settings, describing data, licensing, ArcGIS Online, raster, listing data, along with functions for specific modules like the Spatial Analyst or Mapping modules. In this section, you will explore two of the more commonly used built-in functions:

• The Describe function
• List functions

These are common...