Separate bearings from distances in CAD annotation

[MatthewUpchurch]

I am trying to think of a clever way to separate this CAD information depicted below.  Both the distance and the bearing are within the same layer and have almost identical attributes.  I am trying to think of a way to separate one from another so I can convert the CAD annotation to geodatabase and not have to worry about going through and manually deleting each of the undesired bearing annotation. Please see the illustrations below for examples. I am using ArcMap 10.2.2, 64 bit Windows 7 SP1 machine, SQL-server. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

[BrianOevermann · Accepted solution]

If all of your bearings are formatted as quadrant bearing with an "N" or "S" as the first character, why not use a string function as part of your query? You can query the first character of the field and if it contains an "N" or "S" then put it in the selected set. Invert the selected set for the distances.

Your 'Select by attributes' query would look something like:

SUBSTRING( Text,1,1) = 'N'      (or maybe you need/want to use RefName...)

This is basically "select out of this field, starting at character x, the next y characters")

Use the OR connector to build the query out to include the "S" bearings.

[BrianOevermann]

BTW... then suggest to your data provider that they put their bearing and distance CAD anno on separate layers in the future!

But that's usually easier said than done.

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[MatthewUpchurch]

Brilliant idea Brian. Thanks!