{"id":374,"date":"2011-05-26T23:19:18","date_gmt":"2011-05-26T21:19:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/visurus.wordpress.com\/?p=374"},"modified":"2016-07-04T20:09:53","modified_gmt":"2016-07-04T20:09:53","slug":"py-all-means","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/2011\/05\/py-all-means\/","title":{"rendered":"Py all means"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Over on his blog<\/a>, Bill Dollins muses about the range and ubiquity of the Python language<\/a> in the geospatial realm.<\/p>\n

It’s true \u2013 if you work with ESRI<\/a> products on a daily basis (like I do) you almost can’t get away without using Python one way or the other, be it for scripting some workflow, writing some standalone programme with or without using ESRI’s arcpy<\/a> or implementing advanced Field Calculations in ArcGIS<\/a>. The most important upside about the ubiquity of Python to me is the availability of great packages. In my work I have for example used such diverse packages as EXIF.py<\/a> for manipulating EXIF<\/a> data in images (think extraction of geocoding information from photos), suds<\/a> for accessing SOAP services and Numpy<\/a> for handling computations in, and manipulations of, rasters.
\nVery recently I tested map production automation in ArcGIS using the arcpy.mapping<\/a> package. Part of the task encompassed automatically adapting the map title in accordance with changing map content. The title was put into a relatively small text box and I had thus to find a way to make sure that both a string of say ten characters as well as 25 characters could fit in the space. After some digging I came across a nice package called PyHyphen<\/a> which I could include into my script for hyphenating the title string and thus perfectly solving my problem. It even came with a German dictionary which handled names of Swiss municipalities well!
\nAlso very recently, I finished a study on the threat nuclear power stations present to people<\/a> living in their (more or less immediate) environment. The geospatial part of that study was \u2013 except for a small bit of the open source statistics software R<\/a> thrown in there \u2013 completely done in Python. And if I had already been aware of rpy<\/a> which Bill mentions in his post<\/a>, I might have been able to pull off the entire analysis in Python.<\/p>\n

I think Python is here to stay for a while. In the geospatial realm which works with ESRI it has always been clear that Python is the next thing after AML<\/a> and VBA<\/a>\/ArcObjects. But it’s very good to see that Python in fact has a much broader base than just the ESRI products in the geospatial realm and certainly beyond that. And I also really like that it runs on my Ubuntu desktop as well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Over on his blog, Bill Dollins muses about the range and ubiquity of the Python language in the geospatial realm. It’s true \u2013 if you work with ESRI products on a daily basis (like I do) you almost can’t get away without using Python one way or the other, be it for scripting some workflow, … Continue reading Py all means<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":375,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[7],"tags":[23,45,53,92,102],"class_list":["post-374","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-note","tag-cartography","tag-esri","tag-geoprocessing","tag-python","tag-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/05\/python_logo.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pPwF-62","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2174,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374\/revisions\/2174"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ralphstraumann.ch\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}