Using Select Layer By Location in ArcPy?

Question

I'm a new Python student looking for some help regarding a homework problem. I need to analyze wells with each county in a state. So I have the wells shapefile and a counties shapefile for a state. Not sure how to combine the data so I have a list of wells in each county.

I thought I'd use following:

arcpy.MakeFeatureLayer_management("wells", "wells_lyr")
arcpy.SelectLayerByLocation_management("wells_lyr", "INTERSECT", "counties", "", "NEW_SELECTION")

But this does not give me the wells in each county. Hope this is not too vague; not looking for exact code, just the high level process.

Answer 1

The "Select Layer by Location" tool will select all wells in the existing layer that intersect any county. You're on the right track with the "intersect" operation: you'll find that you get the results you want by using the actual "Intersect" tool, which will create a new output feature class that contains attributes from both of the overlapping input features.