How to rename shapefiles that contain illegal characters?

Question

I need to import multiple ShapeFiles in ArcMap whith the MakeFeatureLayer tool. To do so, I need to rename several layers which contain non-ascii characters ("à","é","è", ...), space (" ") or point (".") in their names.

To be more precise, the issue appears when there is a point in the Shapefile name! The special characters appear to be accepted.

I already saw these posts:

• How can I rename multiple feature classes (each different name) using Python?
• Multiple rename shapefiles and feature classes in python

MY "RAW" FILES

But, when I'm running my code, I got these errors in my IDE...

CODE

import os
import arcpy
from arcpy import env

folder = r'\TESTRENAME'
arcpy.env.workspace = folder

lfc = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()

for f in os.listdir(folder):
    for fc in lfc:
        file_name, file_ext = os.path.splitext(fc)
        in_data = fc
        out_data = file_name.replace(".","_")+file_ext
        data_type = "ShapeFile"
        if in_data != out_data:
            arcpy.Rename_management(in_data, out_data)
        print out_data

ERRORS (IDE)

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<module1>", line 19, in <module>
  File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.5\ArcPy\arcpy\management.py", line 4507, in Rename
   raise e
ExecuteError: Failed to execute. Parameters are not valid.
ERROR 000732: Input Data Element: Dataset shp_19.2_160m.shp does not exist or is not supported
ERROR 000725: Output Data Element: Dataset C:\TESTRENAME\shp_19_2_160m.shp already exists.
Failed to execute (Rename).

ERROR (ArcMap)

As you can see, only the file with the extension ".shp" is renamed and not its related files which are added in ArcCatalog (and should not).

The result is then logically:

Answer 1

You're trying to split an arcpy object using the os module. You are only renaming the .shp extention of the component file. You are not renaming the shapefile, and all its components.

There's an easier way to rename feature classes or shapefiles using the arcpy.Describe function. See more information here.

Try this:

import os
import arcpy
from arcpy import env

folder = r'\TESTRENAME'
arcpy.env.workspace = folder

lfc = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()

for fc in lfc:
    desc = arcpy.Describe(fc)
    newname = desc.baseName.replace(".", "_")
    arcpy.Rename_management(fc, newname)

Or another way is to just use the replace function directly, so:

for fc in lfc:
    arcpy.Rename_management(fc, fc.replace(".", "_"))