Using " instead of inches in a field

[JimNoble]

Hi guys, I am trying to calculate a field to read 2" HDPE in every row

#Calculate field Conduit feature class Underground
arcpy.CalculateField_management("Underground.dbf", "Conduit",
                                '"2in HDPE"', "PYTHON3")

With this I can get every row to read 2in HDPE but everytime I try to insert " instead of in I get an error. Could you guys help me please!

Thanks!

-Jim Noble

[GeoJosh]

Jim,

Try this:

arcpy.CalculateField_management("Underground.dbf", "Conduit",
                                '"2\" HDPE"', "PYTHON3")‍‍‍‍

You need a forward back slash (\) before the parentheses ("). Otherwise, the Python interpreter will think you are trying to close the string.

Best,

Josh

[JoshuaBixby]

Forward slash?  I think "\" is commonly called backslash.

Even with escaping the double quotes, the string still needs to be single quoted and not double quoted.

"'2\" HDPE'"‍

[JimNoble]

Thanks Joshua, your fix worked perfectly.

[JoeBorgione]

Just got back from an ESRI user seminar: at pro 2.5 there finally is Find and Replace functionality!

Personally, I shy away from any special characters in database field values; notice how you need to escape them to get them in there. 'nuff said.....

[DanPatterson_Retired]

not quite the same... but "unicode" is quite a large world to fully explore.

dq = u"\u201D"

f"quoting{dq}"

'quoting”'

"quoting{}".format(dq)

'quoting”'‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

[JoeBorgione]

s = '12in pipe'
s = s.replace('in','\"')‍‍

print(s)
12" pipe‍‍‍‍‍

[JimNoble]

Hi Joe, while your fix didn't pop any errors, it didn't actually fix the problem. Maybe I was using it wrong. This is what I put in.

#Calculate field Conduit feature class Underground

arcpy.CalculateField_management("Underground.dbf", "Conduit",
                                '"2in HDPE"', "PYTHON3")

#Set in name replace with quotation

s = '2in HDPE'
s = s.replace('in','\"')

[JoshuaBixby]

Jim, using Joe's code didn't change anything because you ran it after Calculate Field.  The way the code is written now, you are using Calculate Field to update a table and then changing a string within Python but that change is never making it back into a data set.

[JimNoble]

I see. Thanks for the explanation!