Copying only text from a string field to a new field

[PieterSnyders]

Good day,

I know this is probably a stupid question. I am working with a river data set and the labeling field is a string field containing text (river names) and integer (river codes). I want to copy only the text (river names) to a new field. How can I do this with the field calculator... any help will be appreciated.

Regards,

P

[JakeSkinner]

You will want to specify the field that has the current values in the update() function.  So, change:

 update(!Label_Field!)

to:

update(!TAG!)

This will calculate the values, that begin with a character, from the TAG field to the LABEL_FIELD.

[PieterSnyders]

Success! Thank you! Now I will just have to figure out exactly how this works lol

[PieterSnyders]

Funny enough two numerical values remained: 92 and 9390553

[JakeSkinner]

That was my mistake, the code should have been:

def update(field):
  if field[0] in str(range(0, 10)) or field[0] == '#':
    pass
  else:
    return field

What this code is doing is checking the first character of each value.  If the first character is a number within the range of 0 - 10, or if the character is a '#' sign it will pass this row.  If the character is a letter, it will update the row in the new field with that value.

[PieterSnyders]

Thank you for the explanation, will speed up my work! Really need to learn more of this very handy!