Arcpy - delete attribute data if string starts with..

[AliciaSoto]

Here's what I'm trying to do.

I have a shapefile called 'Roster' with an attribute table like the one below.

NAME	Age	Room
***John	23	B
***Alice	56	C
Tina	34	A

I would like to search the shapefile and delete any data under the field 'NAME' where the string starts with '***'

The resulting table would look like this

NAME	Age	Room
	23	B
	56	C
Tina	34	A

I figured out how to replace the '***' string with another string, but I can't figure out how to delete the entire cell....

def removeName(shapefilePath):
  cursor = arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(shapefilePath, ["NAME"]) 
  for row in cursor: 
       row[0] = row[0].replace("***", None)
       cursor.updateRow(row)
  del row
  del cursor

[JoshuaBixby]

Charlie Frye wrote:

Thanks Ian--I've been writing VBA lately...

An Esri staffer writing VBA?  Isn't that sacrilegious these days seeing that Esri deprecated VBA in 10.1 and has been trying unsuccessfully to retire it since then.