Using ArcPy to Generate Near Table in memory

Question

I have a point SHP in WGS84 (EPSG 4326) and I am trying to tabulate the distances to the nearest point in meters. I need to do the analysis using ArcPy, but I want to get the results in a Pandas dataframe to do other things.

I'm stuck on getting the GenerateNearTable_analysis() in an in-memory format (throws the error below). And then from there, I actually don't know how to pass it into a dataframe.

import arcpy
import pandas as pd

filein = [
    r'D:\mypath\test1.shp',
    r'D:\mypath\test2.shp',
]

for f in filein:
    fout = f.replace(".shp", "")
    TempTab = 'in_memory\\{}_Table'.format(fout)
    arcpy.GenerateNearTable_analysis(f, f, TempTab, method='GEODESIC')

Above throws this error:

arcgisscripting.ExecuteError: ERROR 000210: Cannot create output in_memory\D:\mypath\test_Table
Failed to execute (GenerateNearTable).

I also tried arcpy.GenerateNearTable_analysis(f, TempTab, "memory", method='GEODESIC') as suggested in this answer, and got the following error: arcgisscripting.ExecuteError: Failed to execute. Parameters are not valid. ERROR 000732: Near Features: Dataset 'in_memory\D:\mypath\test_Table' does not exist or is not supported Failed to execute (GenerateNearTable).

Using ArcMap 10.7

Answer 1

You need to get rid of the directory as well as the file extension.

import os

import arcpy
import pandas as pd

filein = [
    r'D:\mypath\test1.shp',
    r'D:\mypath\test2.shp',
]

for f in filein:
    fout = os.path.splitext(os.path.basename(f))[0]  #<=== strip file extension and path
    TempTab = 'in_memory\\{}_Table'.format(fout)
    arcpy.GenerateNearTable_analysis(f, f, TempTab, method='GEODESIC')