This seems like a no-brainer, perhaps I'm missing something. I can easily export tables to .txt format using the the Arcmap interface, but can't do so using arcpy. I have tried the table to table conversion function but this supports every format but a simple .txt file. Is there a work around?
You're right that .TXT is not a supported output format in the Table to Table conversion tool. If you work with a featureclass instead of a table the "Export Feature Attribute to ASCII (Spatial Statistics)" would be an option.
import arcpy,csv
table =r'c:\path\to\table'
outfile = r'c:\path\to\output\ascii\text\file'
#--first lets make a list of all of the fields in the table
fields = arcpy.ListFields(table)
field_names = [field.name for field in fields]
with open(outfile,'wb') as f:
w = csv.writer(f)
#--write all field names to the output file
w.writerow(field_names)
#--now we make the search cursor that will iterate through the rows of the table
for row in arcpy.SearchCursor(table):
field_vals = [row.getValue(field.name) for field in fields]
w.writerow(field_vals)
del row
Please note that things may go wrong with binary (blob) fields and perhaps with Null values as well.
