What causes ArcPy RuntimeError: TextElementObject: Error in setting text?

Question

I am trying to generate a map book with the following code that I downloaded but I keep getting an errror:

*File "Y:\Planning\GIS Planning Analyst\projects\county_map_book\9_GenerateMapBook.py", line 18, in <"module> titleText.text = title File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.0\arcpy\arcpy\arcobjects_base.py", line 77, in _set return setattr(self._arc_object, attr_name, ao) RuntimeError: TextElementObject: Error in setting text*

#Read values from input dialog
title = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0)
organization = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(1)

arcpy.AddMessage("    Updating Title Page ...")
titleMXD = arcpy.mapping.MapDocument("path\county_map_book\MapBook_TitlePage.mxd")
titleText = arcpy.mapping.ListLayoutElements(titleMXD, "TEXT_ELEMENT", "Title")[0]
titleText.text = title
arcpy.mapping.ExportToPDF(titleMXD,"path\county_map_book\Output\1_TitlePage.pdf")
del titleMXD

Answer 1

I noticed that setting empty string to element text will give an error:

RuntimeError: TextElementObject: Error in setting text

So I used one space instead of empty string and that worked fine. In your code add this before setting text:

if title == '':
  title = ' '

Weird behaviour of Python geoprocessing.