Remove duplicate text within an attribute of a feature class

TinaKwitkoski

Hi 

I have an feature class with a field of concatenated  species_codes. I would like to remove the duplicate values. 

I would like to have just one label for each species. ie: AO, BB, BMC, CC, CH....

is there a way to do this?

Any help appreciated

 

Tina

 

MErikReedAugusta

Piece of cake; I just did this operation on some data this morning.

Here's some code for Field Calculator:

A. Function Call

RemoveDupes(!AC!)

B. Code Block

def RemoveDupes(old):
    # Watch out for NULL values, because they'll crash the rest of the code
    if old is None:
        return None

    # If you're still here, assume it's a comma-delimited string, and break
    #   it up into parts.
    oldEntries = old.split(',')
    newEntries = []

    # Loop through the entries
    for entry in oldEntries:
        # Only save the entry if you haven't seen it already
        if entry not in newEntries:
            newEntries.append(entry)

    # Stitch the entries back to a string & write it to the field
    return ','.join(newEntries)

 

Results for the first row:

ANODON,BB,BMC,C,CAS,CC,CH,DC,DV,KO,L,LDC,LNC,LSU,MARFAL,MW,NSC,PK,RB,RSC,SP,SU,WF

This could also be done via an UpdateCursor if you're doing other things, but I gave you Field Calculator first, for the simpler option.

Also, for those familiar with python: I could have used a set for newEntries, and it would've taken care of skipping the duplicates automatically.  But sets in python are unordered, which means the order would scramble when you ran this.  The longer approach of the code above arbitrarily maintains whatever order the entries occur in the field.