Programming ArcGIS 10.1 with Python Cookbook

Getting a list of feature classes in a workspace

As with all the list functions that we'll examine in this chapter, getting a list of feature classes in a workspace is often the first step in a multi-step process that your script will execute. For example, you might want to add a new field to all the feature classes in a file geodatabase. To do this, you'd first need to get a list of all the feature classes in the workspace.

Getting ready

ArcPy provides functions for getting lists of fields, indexes, datasets, feature classes, files, rasters, tables, and more. The ListFeatureClasses() function can be used to generate a list of all feature classes in a workspace. ListFeatureClasses() has three optional arguments that can be passed into the function ...