I have a grid and some lines within a grid and I was wondering how to measure the length of the lines inside the grid. I can use the measure tool for a straight line, however in the future I will not have straight lines. Is there still a way to find the length of the line? I've tried using the tabulate intersection tool only to receive a "the geometry is not M aware error".
1 Answer
The easiest way to calculate shape length is to import your polylines into a file geodatabase. Once you import your shapefile as a featureclass, length is automatically calculated for every feature. If you are interested in calculating shape length within a grid, first run Intersect which will split the polylines into segments within grid. Then Dissolve by the newly created field ID (i.e. the code indicating which polygon grid cell the segments belong to). The resulting featureclass will be multipart features by grid ID including the total shape length by grid.