The problem: I have a geodatabase with several datasets and many more feature classes within. The fields within the feature classes have been populated through joins with shapefiles and manual edits. Often times string fields will become populated with whitespace (i.e. '', ' ', ' ', etc) or the string "Null", and numeric fields will become populated with a zero (0). I would like to find these records and replace them with a true NULL value. I have the following code, which uses an UpdateCursor, but it still very slow and doesn't catch all of the NULL-like records. Does anyone know of other ways to accomplish this task?
GDB = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0) #input geodatabase
arcpy.env.workspace = GDB
datasetList = arcpy.ListDatasets() #list datasets
for dataset in datasetList:
arcpy.env.workspace = os.path.join(GDB, dataset)
fcList = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()
for fc in fcList:
arcpy.AddMessage("Processing %s..." % fc)
#count features
arcpy.MakeTableView_management(fc, "tempTableView")
count = int(arcpy.GetCount_management("tempTableView").getOutput(0))
if count > 0:
fieldList = arcpy.ListFields(fc)
for field in fieldList:
arcpy.AddMessage("...%s" % field.name)
rows = arcpy.UpdateCursor(fc)
for row in rows:
count = 0
if row.isNull(field.name):
continue # if already null
elif field.type == "Text":
value = row.getValue(field.name)
if value.lstrip(' ') == '' or value.lower() == '<null>': # looks for whitespace or '<null>'
row.setNull(field.name)
count += 1
elif field.type == "ShortInteger" or field.type == "LongInteger" or field.type == "Float" or field.type == "Double":
value = row.getValue(field.name)
if value == 0:
row.setNull(field.name)
count += 1
if count > 0: # update row if records have changed
rows.updateRow(row)
del rows
else:
arcpy.AddMessage("...NO RECORDS FOUND.")
