Determining Shape Area Field Name

Question

I'm dealing with a varierty of spatial polygon files (shapefiles, file/personal gdb feature classes, sde feature classes (some with spatial views)) and depending on the file type, I get a mulittude of Shape Area feature class field names (the required field, not a created one)

So for example, the field names vary from "Shape_Area", "SHAPE_Area", "SHAPE.AREA", "GEOMETRY_Area", "GEOMETRY.AREA"

I'm writing a python script to pull out the area of all these types of feature classes and I do something along the lines of:

for field in arcpy.ListFields(fc):
    if field.name in ["Shape_Area", "SHAPE_Area", "SHAPE.AREA", "GEOMETRY_Area", "GEOMETRY.AREA"]:
         do something

I'm wondering if there's a more clever way of pulling out the shape area field, instead of just listing out all the ways it can be named? There doesn't seem to be a field property for something like Area. is there any other way of doing this?

Answer 1

What about the following:

fc = "path to input feature class"
desc = arcpy.Describe(fc)
areafieldname = desc.areaFieldName

Should work on various feature classes that have auto generated Area fields. This will exclude shapefiles.