How to remove a character from Drawing order layer name using arcpy?

[Davec43]

I have a script that creates a geodatabase and then splits a layer by its name into that geodatabase. The problem is if the layer name starts with a number "123" it'll add a "t" to the beginning of the layer name. How do I strip the "t" from the drawing order using arcpy?

[RichlandGIS]

That is probably because you are not allowed to have geodatabase feature class name starting with a number.

R_

[AngelaSchirck]

Not exactly sure what you're trying to do, but to get rid of a leading t in python:  

string = "t123abc"

newstring = string[1:]  //newstring will be everything but the first character of the original string

[Davec43]

Here's a snippet of a portion of the output. Since the layer starts with a number, arc adds a "T". I'm trying to script removal of all the "T's" since it can be tedious manually removing all of them.

When I try this:

import arcpy
Map_name = map1
aprx = arcpy.mp.ArcGISProject("CURRENT")
act_map = aprx.activeMap
map = aprx.listMaps(Map_name)
layer = act_map.listLayers()
for lyr in layer:
    string = lyr[1:]

I get:

Traceback (most recent call last):
File "<string>", line 8, in <module>
TypeError: 'Layer' object is not subscriptable

[RichlandGIS]

lyr is a Layer class, need to grab the layer name from it as string.  Think this is what you are looking for:

for lyr in layer:
    string = lyr.name[1:]

Though, you will still get an error if you try to save them with a name starting with a number in a geodatabase.

R_

[Davec43]

I see what you're saying. I found this from stack exchange and it'll strip the first character from Layer names if they don't have a number as their second character.

fcs = arcpy.ListFeatureClasses()
for fc in fcs:
    Arcpy.Rename_management(fc,fc[1:])

When I try it with a T123... I get

ERROR 000354: The name contains invalid characters
Failed to execute (Rename).

I'm assuming there isn't going to be a way around this?

[RichlandGIS · Accepted solution]

Unless you want to export them to shapefiles (which do allow filenames to start with numbers) you will run into that error.

You could use something like:

string = '_' + lyr.name[1:]

which would replace the 't' with and underscore which will allow you to save them in geodatabase.

R_

[Davec43]

Thats how I'll have to do it. Thanks!