topic Select all records that are in capital letters in ArcGIS Hub Questions

Select all records that are in capital letters

MichelleCouden — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 20:54:41 GMT

I am trying to pull items out of an attribute table. I want to pull out all county names that are in capital letters. I was using UPPER (County) = 'ANDREWS' but it was only pulling up Andrews. I need to pull up several different named counties.

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

DanPatterson_Retired — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 15:13:00 GMT

python lesson

I think the field calculator/query stuff supports the 'IN' operator.. what you want is to compare to the first value of the string to the capital letters in a list

A demo, but this can easily be made into a function if you don't want to copy ucl over obviously so your expression would be

'Yourfield'[0] in uc # or whatever surrounding characters are used for field names

uc = string.ascii_uppercase

# ---- make a list for future reference
ucl = list(uc)
'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'

#  ucl  = ['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E', 'F', 'G', 'H', 'I', 'J', 'K', 'L', 'M', 'N',
           'O', 'P', 'Q', 'R', 'S', 'T', 'U', 'V', 'W', 'X', 'Y', 'Z']

# --- a test
a = 'ANDREWS'  # now 'a' would be your field
a[0] in ucl
True

a[1] in ucl
True

# ---- a quick test for lowercase

'b' in ucl
False‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

MichelleCouden — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 21:13:37 GMT

So there is not a simple syntax for inside the select by attributes??

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

DanPatterson_Retired — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 15:13:03 GMT

No on to what you have to do... since I don't think you can do the query all at once.

Add a field to contain a string or boolean

Calculate the new field using

allcaps(!YourFieldNameHere')

and calculate into a boolean or string field. then you have a field for querying.

def allcaps(a):
    """check for all caps"""
    uc = 'ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ'
    n = len(a)
    m = sum([i in uc for i in a])
    return n == m


# ---- test case  

a = 'ANDREWS'
allcaps(a)
True


b = 'AnDrews'
allcaps(b)
False‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

MichelleCouden — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 21:28:11 GMT

Bummer!! Thanks for the help.

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

JoeBorgione — Sat, 11 Dec 2021 15:13:06 GMT

What if you calculated the names to be ALL UPPER CASE or All Proper Case? (Hmmmm.... sounds dangerously like a standard....)

Using the Python parser in the Field calculator:

(Pre-Logic Script Code box)

def myUpper(instring):
   x = instring.upper()
   return x‍‍‍

myUpper(!YourFieldName!)‍‍

changed slightly:

def myProper(instring):
   x = instring.title()
   return x‍‍‍‍‍‍

 myProper(!YourFieldName!)‍‍

I started with the field value of jose diablo and get JOSE DIABLO and Jose Diablo respectively....

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

DanPatterson_Retired — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 21:44:32 GMT

as long as you leave the original field alone... and calculate in a new field... then you would have a choice... but what if they were to be all lower... or upper then lower... the possibilities are endless... there are so many 'standards' to choose from as one of our illustrious compatriots said

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

JoeBorgione — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 21:54:49 GMT

I'm an upper case kind of guy. The data bases I manage are UC. Nothing else....

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

DanPatterson_Retired — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 22:03:21 GMT

I am too much pythonic... all lower case for me

Re: Select all records that are in capital letters

JoeBorgione — Mon, 11 Dec 2017 22:26:44 GMT