Conditional Statement to make Scripts Compatible with arcpy and arcgisscripting

[Jasonvan_Warmerdam]

Hello,
We are running two versions of ArcGIS at our office, 10.1 and 9.3. I am working on updating some of our python scripts and instead of making two different scripts for both, I wanted to see if I could just combine the two and have the geoprocessor catch a particular version with a conditional if statement. I know I could set a boolean sys.argv to prompt the user to enter their version of ArcGIS, but wanted to see if there was a phrase native to either arcpy or arcgisscripting that would trip the inital if statement if the user was running Arc 10 and if not the script would catch in the else statement for Arc 9.3.  

if [ArcGIS 10]:      Do this else [ArcGIS 9.3]:      Do this

Thanks,
Jason

[DanPatterson_Retired]

Jason, did you try a simple try except block

try:
  import arcpy as gp
  gp_version = 10.0
except:
  import arcgisscripting as gp
  gp_version = 9.3

then you can do

if gp_version == 10.0:
  #do the arcpy stuff
else:
  #do the arcgiscripting stuff

[Jasonvan_Warmerdam]

Thanks Dan!
That try statement worked great.
Jason

[ChrisSnyder · Accepted solution]

To be more explicit, you could use the .GetInstallInfo method. Something like:

try:    installInfoDict = arcpy.GetInstallInfo("DESKTOP") except:    installInfoDict = gp.getinstallinfo("DESKTOP")  if installInfoDict['Version'] == '10.0':    do this elif if installInfoDict['Version'] == '9.3':    do that else:    do someting completely different

[JasonScheirer]

Just write your scripts for 9.3. They'll be backwards compatible in 10.0.