Getting the Latitude of Origin for a spatial reference

timloesch

Greetings,

I'm using Python to extract the parameters of projected coordinate systems but I'm finding that the SpatialReference object does not have a .latitudeOfOrigin property that I need to extract.

When I look at the projection parameters in ArcMap the latitude of origin is there but I cannot find where to access that value in the SpatialReference object. I can get all of the other parameters but this seems to be missing.

Can someone point me in the right direction?

thanks

tim

ShaunWalbridge

NOTE: as of Version 10.3, the SpatialReference object contains the "latitudeOfOrigin" property, and the trick below is unncessary.

Hi Tim,

It looks like a property which should be included in the SpatialReference object, but I don't see it either. For a quick and dirty hack, you can pull the relevant string out of the exportToString() results:

import arcpy
import re 
# a projection with a latitude of origin property 
proj = 'NAD 1983 Contiguous USA Albers'  
sr = arcpy.SpatialReference(proj)  
lat_of_origin_regex = "Latitude_Of_Origin',(\d+\.?\d*)]"
match = re.search(lat_of_origin_regex, sr.exportToString())
if match:
 lat_of_origin = float(match.groups()[0])
    print "{0} has latitude of origin {1}".format(proj, lat_of_origin)
else:
    print "no latitude of origin detected."

Set up your own spatial reference object in the code above, and you should be able to use the lat_of_origin variable to get what you need.

cheers, Shaun