ArcMap Label Engine Scripting

A question came up on the GIS StackExchange this morning asking about how to perform string indexing in VBScript for ArcMap 10's label engine. It made me realize how verbose VBScript is when compared to Python, and to an extent, JavaScript.

The question required the first 2 characters of a field to be placed on the first line of the label, then the remainder of the field to be on the second line and the third line to contain a another field.

To do this in VBScript requires a left function to get the first two characters and a mid function combined with len to get the remainder of the string:


The JavaScript code is a bit cleaner, using \n instead of the horrendous VBNewline, but still uses the substring function combined with a length function to chop up the string:


The Python code uses the \n newline statement and simple string indexing to chop up the string, string[:2] returns the first two characters of a string and string[2:] returns everything after the first to characters until the end of the string, with no need to use len(). This is a much more elegant solution, which I also think is a lot easier to read, regardless of language preference: