Receiving error 000539 from CalculateField_management?

Question

I am trying to add (ie "Author", "LastUpdated") to feature classes within a gdb and then populate each of those fields. I have been able to get my code to run properly for the numerical field but I cannot get it to run for the text field.

    fcList = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()
    fieldName1 = "Author"
    expression1 = "John Doe"

    for fc in fcList:    

            arcpy.AddField_management(fc,fieldName1, "TEXT")

            arcpy.CalculateField_management(fc, fieldName1, expression1, "PYTHON")

My code returns this error:

ExecuteError: ERROR 000539: <type 'exceptions.SyntaxError'>: unexpected EOF while parsing (<expression>, line 1)
Failed to execute (CalculateField).

How can I fix this?

Answer 1

You have to include quotes within your expression string. Try this:

fcList = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()
    fieldName1 = "Author"
    expression1 = "\"John Doe\""

    for fc in fcList:    

            arcpy.AddField_management(fc,fieldName1, "TEXT")

            arcpy.CalculateField_management(fc, fieldName1, expression1)

By adding in escaped double quotes, your field will be sent the string "John Doe" instead of John Doe without quotes. For text fields, the quotes are required.