Batch Copy Shapefiles to Geodatabse: How to improve current script

Question

Firstly, please note that I'm new to programming and Python. I've created the following Python script to loop through a directory, validate the shapefile names that I then copy to a specified File Geodatabase. The are some shapefiles that have that already have "_shp" attached the shapefile name and the "ValidateTableName" adds "_shp" to the output Feature Class. I have striped out "_shp" before copy the shapefile to the Geodatabase. I have noticed that where the shapefile already had "_shp" it drops an additional character at the end. How to i prevent this from happenning. i.e. citiespop_shp.shp = citispoimport arcpy, os
... arcpy.env.workspace = r"S:\Projects\H108392\H108392.gdb"
... arcpy.env.OverwriteOutput = True
... inWksp = r"S:\Projects\H108392\data_received\KageraMonograph\KAGERA_GIS\_Vector_Data"
... for root, dirs, files in os.walk(inWksp):
...     for name in files:
...         if name.endswith(".shp"):
...             path = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(root, name))
...             base = arcpy.ValidateTableName(os.path.basename(path))
...             print "Processing "+base
...             arcpy.CopyFeatures_management(path, "S:/Projects/H108392/H108392.gdb/"+base.rstrip("_shp"))

Any advice would be appreciated and as well as any pointers wher I could improve the structure of my code.

Regards

BruceNielsen · Answer

Peter,

I think slicing can help you in this case. base[:-4] should return everything except the last 4 characters.

MarcoBoeringa · Answer

The error is in the incorrect usage of Python's "rstrip" command. "rstrip" removes ANY occurrences of the characters in the search string you supply (in your case "_shp") from the right side of the processed string. This is why it is going wrong, since "citiespop_shp" contains an additional "p" character as the ending, and since "p", is part of "_shp", it is also removed from "citiespop", resulting in "citiespo". The removing only stops at the "o" character ("citiespo"), as that is the first character not part of the search string "_shp"

Please note that for "rstring", the order of the characters you supply is irrelevant. If you coded:

"teststring.rstring("phs_")"
 
the results would be exactly the same, e.g. giving you "citiespo" for the processed basename "citiespop_shp"

You will need to use another of Python's string commands to accomplish what you want to do.