Repeating and Overlapping Line Features.....

Question

I have a feature class (polylines) that evidently has overlapping lines in it. Is there a fast way to delete the repeating features? Up to this point I have been selecting a vertices and moving it to see the lines behind it.

RichardFairhurst · Answer

Do I need to make a copy of the feature class before doing this? Is there a chance I will mess the file up and can't go back? Thanks for the help.

Yes, it is wise to have a back up, especially when first testing out and learning how topology behaves.  Corruption is not so much of a problem as much as failing to realize how your choices using the topology tools affect your features, because you are not used to them.  Topology will permanently alter your data, but it does it within an edit session.  As long as you catch problems before saving and exiting the edit session you can undo them or prevent them from becoming permanent, but if you missed a problem after committing the edits you cannot go back without some kind of backup.  Once you have everything working well and understand the topology workflow options and the critical quality check steps you need to do, you could choose to delete all back ups and work with the topology controlled feature class alone.

JamesReed1 · Answer

Topology tools are what I use for this type of thing. For this, the data needs to be in a geodatabase. Then you create the topology in that geodatabase and then create rules like "must not overlap" and "must not have gaps". Then there is a topology tool bar that makes these fixes easier.

There is another process that may do what you want. I've heard of it only recently, but have not had to use it.

Do I need to make a copy of the feature class before doing this? Is there a chance I will mess the file up and can't go back? Thanks for the help.

T__WayneWhitley · Answer

I realize the output I included after the code block above may not make sense to you since there's no context, so I am attaching the small test shapefile I ran this snippet on...  If you want to try it out, change the 'fc' variable to the full pathname of the location to which you save the unzipped shapefile.  Then it would help if you observed the line segment overlaps in ArcMap, etc.

Sorry if I wasn't so clear on that at 1st - I would think if you are really intent on using something like this, you'd rather have something to flag features via a field value in order to examine the overlapping line segments before deleting.

Anyway, hope this interests you...

-Wayne

Export_Output_10.zip