Get a coordinate system from raster file

Question

I am writing a code to loop through all the files in a folder and reproject them, using a raster as the spatial reference. I have a suspicion that there is a different way to get the coordinate system from a raster. This is my code so far:

#Import system modules
import arcpy
import os

#Set environment
arcpy.env.workspace = "D:/Project/Joined"
arcpy.env.overwriteOutput = True

#Get list of files in Joined folder
fileList = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()
print fileList

#Set raster as basis for coordinate system
base = "D:/Project/Data/Development.tif"
base2 = arcpy.Describe(base)
out_coor_system = arcpy.SpatialReference(base2)

#Loop through shapefiles in fileList and reproject 
for fc in fileList:
    outName = fc + '_rprj.shp'
    new = arcpy.Project_management(fc, outName, out_coor_system)

This is the error I am receiving:

File "D:/Project/Data/Reproject.py", line 16, in <module>
    out_coor_system = arcpy.SpatialReference(base2)
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.3\ArcPy\arcpy\arcobjects\mixins.py", line 949, in __init__
    self._arc_object.createFromFile(item)
RuntimeError: ERROR 999999: Error executing function.

From what I've read, this is a pretty generic error for Python IDLE to throw.

I made the code print out out_coor_system and I am getting: <geoprocessing spatial reference object object at 0x0D2CE830> printed out to me. Could this be the problem?

I also wanted to add that the projection I am trying to use is a custom one that my organization uses. I don't know if that's relevant (it seems it shouldn't be) but I wanted to throw that in.

Answer 1

You're codes not quite right. You're trying to create a spatial reference object from a describe object. Here's a fix:

#Set raster as basis for coordinate system
base = "D:/Project/Data/Development.tif"
out_coor_system = arcpy.Describe (base).spatialReference

#Loop through shapefiles in fileList and reproject 
for fc in fileList:
    outName = fc + '_rprj.shp'
    new = arcpy.Project_management (fc, outName, out_coor_system)

Answer 2

This worked for me:

out_coor_system = arcpy.Describe(base).spatialReference

Answer 3

if the out_coor_system is giving you an object, wouldn't you need to specify something like out_coor_system.name? because projections are specified by giving the projection name in the arc.Project_management args.I don't think the function is able to evaluate the object as it stands now.

Answer 4

Thank you to everyone who helped me with this. I ended up creating a spatial reference object from the raster. What eventually worked was this:

#Set raster as basis for coordinate system
base = "D:/Project/Data/Development.tif"
sr = arcpy.CreateSpatialReference_management("", base)   

#Loop through shapefiles in fileList and reproject 
for fc in fileList:
    outName = fc[:-4] + '_rprj.shp'
    new = arcpy.Project_management(fc, outName, sr)

To be honest, I'm not sure why this worked. If anyone has any insight to offer, that would be great.