Geometry tokens were introduced in ArcGIS 10.1 as a performance improvement for cursors. Rather than returning the entire geometry of a feature inside the cursor, only a portion of the geometry is returned. Returning the entire geometry of a feature can result in decreased cursor performance due to the amount of data that has to be returned. It's significantly faster to return only the geometry that is needed.
A token is provided as
one of the fields in the field
list passed into the constructor for a cursor and is in the format SHAPE@<Part of Feature to be Returned>
. The only exception to this format is the OID@
token, which returns the object ID of the feature. The following code example retrieves the x and y coordinates of a feature:
with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(fc, ("SHAPE@XY","Facility","Name")) as cursor:
The following table lists the available geometry tokens. Not all cursors support the full list of tokens. Please...