Hey all!
Started a new project, brought in some tiffs to georeference to Pakistan and it worked fine. Doing research on the 2022 flooding and looking into glacier locations/size. Couldn't find any quick glacier .shp file data, so I just wanted to create a simple feature class(FC) to generally visualize their locations to overlay the images, with two attributes. I've created countless geodatabases with quite a few FCs before, but for some reason I get thrown the "Invalid Characters" Error. There are no invalid characters of my creation according to proper naming convention, see screenshots attached. One thing of note too, when I click finish the first error window I receive is blank, then I hit finish again and it populates. (I only provided one set of screenshots, but I tried many other combinations, less characters, no underscores, unselecting M and Z coordinates, etc)
This happened with another small side project I was working when I tried changing the default names generated by the geoprocessing tools I was using, export and buffer tools. When I change the name I usually use the project folder icon to make sure my paths are right, but as soon as I click 'OK,' it adds a .shp after the "FeatureClassNAME" in the output FC slot and the tool UI gives the red X icon. I then manually delete .shp in the output FC slot, but it reverts back to the .shp extension. So, I did some troubleshooting for the latter and accepted ALL the defaults and it worked, then I renamed after completion.
I suspected this was some dependency/cache/ whatever mystery, so I uninstalled Pro and deleted all associated folders to Pro to get a "clean slate," but I am still getting the invalid characters error. I even tried not changing the FC type by accessing the dropdown(default polygon, I want Points), giving the FC a one letter name, selecting WGS 1984, then hitting finish. Alas I still receive the error. Starting to get superstitious this has to do with me using ENVI for a class in my MS program and Arc is getting jealous(Just kidding). Seriously though, what is going on here? Any insight the community may have please help because I really need to use Pro. I am not sure what is happening this year on my PC with Pro because I was having numerous issues with the Deep Learning Libraries too throwing weird errors. Anyways that's for another day.
Thanks,
Adam Kendall (GIS Analyst, MS GIS Student UMD)
PS.: If this is an embarrassingly simple issue an experienced user should know how to fix, be sure to let me down easy.