Delete row with specific text in a specific field at a specific time

Question

I have a feature class that resides in an Enterprise geodatabase, I need to delete a row that has specific text in a specific field at a specific. Data is being submitted daily to this feature class via Survey123, a "dummy" point is created daily for other purposes. I would like to delete that "dummy" point daily at a specific time using ArcPy. I am novice with ArcPy.

import arcpy

myFC = ("target dataset")

commentfield = 'Comments'
sql = """{0} LIKE '%NameOfTextToSearchFor%'""".format(arcpy.AddFieldDelimiters(myFC,commentfield))

with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(myFC, commentfield, sql) as cursor:
    for row in cursor:
        cursor.deleteRow(row)

I couldn't figure out how to indent the last two lines

Answer 1

In this example, I check for any occurrence of the text 'Test' in the field "some_field" using an if statement. For example, this will delete rows in any of the following cases: '1234test_abcd', 'Test', 'test', 'one_moreTest'. Using the `.lower() method allows you to include any type of case in the search term (e.g. 'Test', 'test', 'TeSt', etc).

You would use the .deleteRow() method to delete any instances of the search term.

For example:

import arcpy

fc = r'C:\path\to\your\geodatabase.gdb\featureclass'

with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, "some_field") as cursor:
    for row in cursor:
        if row[0] is not None and 'test' in row[0].lower():
            cursor.deleteRow()

To be more specific in your search term, replace the following:

if row[0] is not None and 'test' in row[0].lower():

with:

if row[0] == 'Test':

Finally, if you need to specify a time constraint, try the following (untested) code:

import arcpy

fc = r'C:\path\to\your\geodatabase.gdb\featureclass'

time_value = 'add-your-time-stamp-here'

with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, ["time_field", "some_field") as cursor:
    for row in cursor:
        if row[0] == time_value: # Only iterates through rows with your time stamp
            if row[1] == 'Test': # Checks for your search term
                cursor.deleteRow() # Delete row