Remove Characters using Field Calculator

Question

Hi!

I've had this issue in the past, and don't think I've ever come up with a great way to resolve it other than doing a manual cut/paste for each field.

I have one field of attributes that has an address and a direction (100 S Main St - 2NW; 1343 W Kimberly Rd - 3WSE; etc) and I need to calculate just the address portion (100 S Main St; 1343 W Kimberly Rd; etc) into a new field.  I know that I can use the Left/Mid/Right functions to remove a specific number of characters from a string, but my proplem is that that number will vary.  Is there any way that I can calculate only the characters to the left of the hyphen (as all attributes have the hyphen) into a new field?  Or by the same token, remove all characters to the right of, and including, the hyphen?

Thanks in advance!
Stephanie

JamesHood · Answer

I lifted this from elsewhere but very useful. 
 
this is VB , not python

split on character - To split a field into a list 
----------  In code Block ----------

dim splitList
dim value

splitList= split( [Feild1], ";")
if ubound(splitList) > 1 then 'if there's no comma, there's only one value in the splitList array and the next statement would error out
  value = splitList(0)
end if

----------  In Field =   ----------
value

StephanieMacuga · Answer

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions!  I actually found an existing thread (eventually!!) that allowed me to do what I needed.  Using a combination of the Left and InStr functions as found in this post, http://forums.arcgis.com/threads/28351-VBScript-Left()-amp-InStr()-functions-ArcView-10, I was able to get what I needed!

Thanks again!

BruceNielsen · Answer

Stephanie,

You can extract just the address portion of your string with the Python statement:address=input[:input.find("-")].strip()

where input is your original string with both address and direction.