extracting time information from arcpy.da.searchcursor and Tuples

Question

So I have a feature class in a GDB that contains time data that I wish to carry out calculations through arcpy. This data was entered from a string to a datetime format into the featureclass through a script that handles a special type of ASCII file.

The output format of this tuple, when accessed using arcpy.da.SearchCursor() takes the form of the following:

(datetime.datetime(1899, 12, 30, 13, 59, 18),)

Where the type of value I need to carry out further calculation needs to take the following form:

datetime.datetime(1899, 12, 30, 0, 0)

I get to this problem when I try the following code:

fc = "C:\\scripting\\timetest.gdb\\test1\\"
rows = arcpy.da.SearchCursor(fc,["time"])
a = []
for row in rows:
    a.append(row)

And when I look at the type of the output, I receive a 'tuple', which is the normal data output of the arcpy.da.SearchCursor() class.

type(a[0])
<type 'tuple'>

But what I really want to do is break the information out of the tuple so that I can carry out normal python operations with the datetime.datetime objects.

The help pages haven't been terribly useful in finding a way to break the data out of the tuple format. I can't print the information inside the tuple, nor can I access like an array. What I seek to do is get at the datetime.datetime object inside the tuple so that I may carry out my analysis. Has anyone run into this problem before?

I've uploaded a shapefile with the problem that I'm running at http://brianbancroft.ca/docs/timetest.zip in case someone wants to try running it.

Answer 1

While I don't have an answer to the problem of extracting data from a tuple with a single element, I have found a workaround.

Instead of using arcpy.da.SearchCursor(), I found that arcpy.SearchCursor() did the job. Using the same sample data, I found that you could extract datetime.datetime objects by carrying out the following:

a = []
rows = arcpy.SearchCursor(fc)
for row in rows:
    a.append(row.getValue("time"))

If you're attempting to extract value from multiple fields, this will result in a few extra lines of code in the for/while loop, but it will get the job done all the same.