Deleting shapefiles and rasters using arcpy

Question

I am trying to delete a series of files from a gdb and I am encountering suprising difficulties doing so. When I test my procedure in one of the files, let's call it 'yy.shp'This is what I do:

from arcpy import env 
from arcpy.sa import * 
import os 
env.workspace  = env.scratchWorkspace = "path/to/my/GEODB.gdb"
arcpy.Delete_management(r'yy.shp')

And I receive the error:

Runtime error Traceback (most recent call last): File "", line 1, in File "c:\program files (x86)\arcgis\desktop10.4\arcpy\arcpy\management.py", line 3995, in Delete raise e ExecuteError: ERROR 999998: Unexpected Error

Notice that if I do:

arcpy.Exists(r'yy.shp')

I get a TRUE result

What am I doing wrong? I have checked and there is definitely no mistake in the path or names of the files. I got these names by dragging and dropping the gdb and file into the python console.

Answer 1

As commented by @Vince:

You can't delete a shapefile from a file geodatabase because you can't put a shapefile in a file geodatabase in the first place. They are different formats, and not interchangeable. It is not legal to create a FGDB table with a period in the table name. If you have used the operating system to corrupt the .gdb directory contents with a shapefile set of files, you'll need to remove them from the directory (using the OS) before you can generate a legal name for deletion.