counting columns with text

[MiikaMäkelä1]

Hi all,

I have 4 columns which can contain a string (a name) or can have a value <NULL>.

I want to create a 5th column where I count the number of strings in the 4 columns.

so for example:

Column A - Column B - Column C - Column D - Column Count

textA - textB - <NULL> - <NULL> - 2
<NULL> - textB - textC - textD - 3

So how do I populate this Column Count?

Thanks for any ideas!

Miika

[MiikaMäkelä1]

Thanks!

I couldn't get the first code block to work either, but it was the "less transparent" code that did the job!

Thanks so much, now I won't have to count 700k rows manually 😄

[MiikaMäkelä1]

So, maybe the problem is something with this none constant in Python? I'm using ArcGIS 10.1 - could there be differences in Python coding? Anyway, the problem is solved with the "less transparent code".

[LT]

No, I really don't think the None constant was the problem.  I bet it has to do with those special characters in your data.  I don't have any data like that to test, but I do have data with <<Null>> values and it worked fine for that.   My guess is that the special chars in the the strings were stymieing the len function.

Basically, you're just testing if the string is empty or null.  So it could be done as:

if a! = '' and  a =! None: