How to tell if 2 polygons are touching but ignoring corners

[PeterKosowan]

Hello.

I have quite a tricky question and I am unsure if an answer exists. I have data in the form of shp files, and these are polygons that represent areas of the map. All the polygons are continuous, meaning they perfectly cover the map with no overlapping.

I am interested in generating a list of all polygons and their neighbors. The tricky part is, I want to exclude any neighbors that are technically only touching at the corners. To illustrate, imagine a chess board. If I select any square I would only want the 4 immediate neighbors (up, right, down, left) but do not want to include the 4 corners pieces in the output.

I tried doing this with a Spatial Join and the Boundary Touches option, but this sadly included the corner polygons in the analysis, essentially flooding the output with the corner data as well. I tried the Share a line segment with option, but due to the nature of the file this option produced a list of 0.

If anyone has any ideas of how I may achieve this, please let me know.

Thanks!

[PeterKosowan · Accepted solution]

I may have answered my own question.

I instead tried the Polygon Neighbors function. While the output still includes the corners, there is a 'Length' attribute in the output. If I exclude all length 0 outputs, this will get rid of the corners.