I realize this script says "Author: Esri" but that does not mean it's well written. Ha.
Break up the big "try" block into many functions. Never wrap the whole thing in one try block. In fact it's usually easier to get rid of the try block and let the code crash and tell you what line it was on when it crashed. This can backfire if it's inside the Esri code but most often points at some stupid typo.
They put everything in a try block specifically to hide the error messages from you to make it look all bright and shiny. We out here in the trenches WANT the ALL the error messages.
When using any try block (if you must) always print out the exception like this
try:
a = b[0]
except Exception as e:
print("Exception", e)
Of course add whatever else you want like arcpy.AddMessages() or whatever. But the contents of "e" is invaluable.
Always set up to run the script in a debugger like VS Code or Spyder. Using functions helps a lot here too. You can create test cases for each function and test them independently in the debugger.
In your case after adding the "Exception" and running your code in VS Code, I saw this
EXCEPTION module 'string' has no attribute 'split'
"string" module ---- I never use that and don't want to learn. 🙂 That whole line 53 looks perilous to me. There is no "split" method. Maybe it's leftover from Python 2.x??
inFeatureClasses = string.split(re.sub("'""","",arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0)), ";")
The regular expression in there is just torture to me and I don't want to look at it for you.
It looks like it's doing something with quotes and then returning an unquoted list based on using a semi-colon as a separator.
Ignoring it, get rid of "string.split"
Using just split, instead,
param = arcpy.GetParameterAsText(0)
fcs = re.sub("'""", "", param) # Whatever this does
inFeatureClasses = fcs.split(';')
That might fix the whole script, I doubt it, but you have to fix one thing at a time...
Imagine a world in which Esri implemented best practices designed to make more robust code and to help end users instead of hiding mistakes.
