Calculating Time of Day

Question

I want to calculate a text field call "TIME_DAY," depending of whether or not the time falls within of four time periods it should return one of four values. My script should work, but it doesn't.

def timeday(time, am, diur, pm, noc):
    if(time >=am AND time < diur):
        return “cerp_am”
    elif(time>= diur AND time<pm):
        return “diurnal”
    elif(time>=pm AND time<noc):
        return “cerp_pm”
    else:
        return “nocturnal”

---

 timeday(!LMT_TIME!, !B_C_AM1!, !B_DIUR1!, !B_C_PM1!, !BEG_NOC1!)

I'm getting ERROR 000989: Python syntax error: Parsing error Syntax.

Here is what my attribute table looks like:

@Midavalo's solution worked well for the vast majority of my data, except for a few datasets, where it mistakenly places midnight values in the "diurnal" category.

Answer 1

Without seeing actual values for your fields it's hard to answer, but for a syntax error I imagine it may be the uppercase AND. Change this to and

def timeday(time, am, diur, pm, noc):
    if(time >=am and time < diur):
        return "cerp_am"
    elif(time>= diur and time<pm):
        return "diurnal"
    elif(time>=pm and time<noc):
        return "cerp_pm"
    else:
        return "nocturnal"

Python is case sensitive, so most operators in python should be in lower case only.

Additionally, you will need to fix the quote marks - “ and ” should be ". These odd quote marks happen when you copy/paste into and out of something like Microsoft Word as it likes to be helpful and automatically change characters to others that it thinks look nice, but don't flow well into syntax/format dependant code like Python.