Using a Search Cursor with a list

Question

What I'm attempting to do is create a list of .dbf tables using a wildcard which I've managed to do. From there my goal is to search the list and extract the value of a specific field. This field only contains 1 row, the value will then be used to populate a field contained in another table which, I haven't begun to attempt yet.Below is a code snippet:

tableList05 = arcpy.ListTables("*_2005.dbf")
#for table05 in tableList05:
with arcpy.SearchCursor(tableList05, ['SUM'])as cursorFive:
    for row in cursorFive:
       print row

For now I'm simply trying to get those values to print before trying to manage how to copy them and update the records in an existing table. The error message I receive when I run this section of code tells me the .dbf tables don't exist.

Answer 1

`tableList05' - assuming it isn't empty - contains a list of the filenames only. No path names

You need to set the workspace so Python knows where these tables are located:

Option 1:

arcpy.env.workspace = "<folder>"

Option 2:

#The variable now contains absolute paths to the tables.
from os.path import join
tableList05 = [join("<folder>", tbl) for tbl in arcpy.ListTables("*_2005.dbf")]