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I have a date-time field in a feature class which I want to query. The field has values like "2011-01-01 00:00:29".
I want to query the data between the time 00:06:00 and 00:12:00. The date does not matter an shall be ignored.
Any ideas how to do this?
I have had a little play around with your problem and have come up with a solution of sorts. Working with dates and times is always a pain and doubly so in ArcGIS as it has really limited support for these data types. I would love to see some other solutions to this problem as I am probably making this more complex than it needs to be.
In SQL you could just select this data (assuming it is correctly formatted in the DateTime format) using a BETWEEN statement:
SELECT * FROM [TABLE] WHERE [TIME_FIELD] BETWEEN '00:06:00' AND '00:12:00'
But in ArcGIS this is not possible (I think because of the *.dbf format at the heart of shapefiles) as the only way to store the dates and times you have are as strings.
However we can use field calculator and a Python command to separate the date from the time and then remove the colons from between the hours minutes and seconds and finally cast it to an integer.
int(''.join(!date_time!.split(' ')[1].split(':')))
(!date_time! is the name of the field containing the date/time strings)
This means that a value of 00:06:00 will be represented in a new field as 600 and a value of 00:12:00 will be stored as 1200.
From these integers we can perform a selection using a modification of the above SQL query to find the correct points:
SELECT * FROM [TABLE] WHERE:
"time_int" > 600 AND "time_int"< 1200
