topic Re: How to clip polygons in a shapefile in Data Management Questions

How to clip polygons in a shapefile

JeffreyVu — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:24:49 GMT

I have searched the forums but haven't found anything similar with my task. Your help, guidance would be appreciated.

I have several polygons in a shapefile with a Priority field. How do I clip the polygons based on this field?

Thanks in advance.
Jeffrey

Re: How to clip polygons in a shapefile

AlexeyTereshenkov — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 19:22:09 GMT

Hi Jeffrey,

I am not sure what exactly you are trying to achieve. Could you please elaborate on the problem?

Re: How to clip polygons in a shapefile

JeffreyVu — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 20:21:05 GMT

Hi Alexey,

I have a feature class with 5 polygons (polygon 1-5) overlapped to each others with values 1-5 in the Priority field . I would like to clip the polygons based on WYSIWYG. The top polygon (polygon 1) will be unchanged while the polygon 2 will be clipped by the polygon 1. Polygon 3 will be clipped by polygon 1 & 2, and so on.

Regards.
Jeffrey

Re: How to clip polygons in a shapefile

YateeshKandi — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 09:00:51 GMT

Hi Jeffrey,

Hope you have found a way out here to clip the polygons. Can you please let me know how it has been achieved?

Thank You..

Regards,
Yateesh

Re: How to clip polygons in a shapefile

HardolphWasteneys — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 03:50:21 GMT

I have searched the forums but haven't found anything similar with my task. Your help, guidance would be appreciated.

I have several polygons in a shapefile with a Priority field. How do I clip the polygons based on this field?

Thanks in advance.
Jeffrey

Jeffrey,

the simplest way to do this is using the EDITOR Clip:

Assuming you have a small number of polygons in a single shapefile (or FC) with a small number of priority levels (e.g. 1 to 5) you can sequentially select single features either in the attribute table to see the priority level or manually with the edit tool (perhaps labelling the polygons with the Priority Field and then in the EDITOR menu hit Clip and using 0.0 buffer distance and the "Discard the area that intersects" option.

This will acheive what you want though limited to one clipping polygon at a time, and it will drill down through all other polygons not only in the shapefile but any others intersected as well.

The CLIP Tool in ArcToolBox will clip with multiple features selected at one time, but creates a new feature class preserving the area intersected, rather like the intersect tool, rather than chopping out the intersected area in the shapefile.

Hardolph

Re: How to clip polygons in a shapefile

JeffreyVu — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:19:06 GMT

Thanks Hardolph. I already found a solution using model builder.