update cursor using a wildcard

jameljoseph

hello,

I am using an update cursor in my python script to go through my table records and I want to assign the same value to all the universities that start with "University of".

Here is an example of what I want to do:

if row[0] == "Boston College":

[code here]

elif row[0] == "University of *":

[code here]

else:

I thought the * was the wildcard but all my records that have "University of" as the prefix in a record do not have any values in them, whereas Boston College does.

DarrenWiens2

For your purposes, 'in' should work, however it doesn't guarantee that the string starts with those characters. I'll just point out that there is 'startswith()' that tests string beginnings:

>>> a = "university of"  
... b = "university of pythonia"
... c = "pythonia university of"
... print b.startswith(a) # does b start with a?
... print c.startswith(a) # does c start with a?
... 
True
False

or, an alternative using slice notation:

>>> a = "university of"  
... b = "university of pythonia"
... c = "pythonia university of"
... print b[:len(a)] == a # do the first few items (letters) in b equal a?
... print c[:len(a)] == a # do the first few items (letters) in c equal a?
... 
True
False