Create Unique ID

IanIrmischer

I have a large featureclass with over 100000 records.  I have a field called Last_name.  There are 200 unique last names in this field such as "jones" or "smith".  I would like to create a new field called UID that puts a number in this field based on the last name.  Since I have 200 last names, this field would then have just 200 numbers in it from 1 to 200.  This will be used to remove personal information from the featureclass.  Is there a function in arcpy to create a new field with unique IDs based on another field?

Or is there a script I can use in the field calculator to accomplish this?

Thanks,

Ian

JacobTodd1

Hi Ian,

You could also give this script a try as well.

import arcpy

ws = arcpy.env.workspace = r"<workspace path>"

fc= "<feature class>"

field_LN = "<Last Name field>"

field_UID = "UID"

#Create field list

fields = arcpy.ListFields(fc, "", "")

#Create an empty set to be populated with unique last names

seen = set()

#Loop through fields and perform a search cursor to find the unique last names and then

for field in fields:

    with arcpy.da.SearchCursor(fc, field_LN) as sCur:

        for row in sCur:

            items = row[0]

            #Add unique last names to the set()

            seen.add(items)

#Convert the set to a list

uniqueValues = list(seen)

#Loop through unique value list

for item in uniqueValues:

    #Perform an update cursor that updates a unique value field to that of the last name's index in the unique values list

    with arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(fc, [field_LN, field_UID]) as iCur:

        for row in iCur:

            if row[0] == item:

                row[1] = uniqueValues.index(item)

            if row[0] == item:

                row[1] = uniqueValues.index(item)

            if row[0] == item:

                row[1] = uniqueValues.index(item)

            iCur.updateRow(row)

Hopefully this will help you achieve your desired result.

- Jacob