Arcpy - delete attribute data if string starts with..

AliciaMSoto

Here's what I'm trying to do.

I have a shapefile called 'Roster' with an attribute table like the one below.

NAME	Age	Room
***John	23	B
***Alice	56	C
Tina	34	A

I would like to search the shapefile and delete any data under the field 'NAME' where the string starts with '***'

The resulting table would look like this

NAME	Age	Room
	23	B
	56	C
Tina	34	A

I figured out how to replace the '***' string with another string, but I can't figure out how to delete the entire cell....

def removeName(shapefilePath):
  cursor = arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(shapefilePath, ["NAME"]) 
  for row in cursor: 
       row[0] = row[0].replace("***", None)
       cursor.updateRow(row)
  del row
  del cursor

AliciaMSoto

Thank you both for your help.

The code worked once I changed cursor.update(row) to cursor.updateRow(row)

Here is the final code

def removeName(shapefilePath):
  cursor = arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(shapefilePath, ["NAME"])
  for row in cursor:
    nameStr = row[0]
    if nameStr[0:3] == "***":
      row[0] = ""
    cursor.updateRow(row)
  del row
  del cursor