Deleting fields if name contains underscore ("_") with ArcPy?

Question

I have several duplicate fields with under score characters in a feature class that I would like to delete. How can this be accomplished using ArcPy? My code below lists the fields, what steps should be executed next to delete anything in field_names?

fc= "featureclass"
field_names = [f.name for f in arcpy.ListFields(fc)]
print field_names

Output:

[u'OBJECTID', u'JOBID', u'MOBILEID', u'COMPANY', u'ADDRESS', u'CITY', u'ZIPCODE', u'WORKSTATUS', u'WTBDTDATE', u'WTBDTTIME', u'WORKTYPE', u'LATTITUDE', u'LONGITUDE', u'DAYS_OVERDUE', u'OVERDUE_STATUS', u'SHAPE', u'STATUS', u'ZONEID', u'PRIORITY', u'ORIGPRIORITY', u'NEXTJOBID', u'MOBILE', u'DESCRIPTION', u'REGION', u'DISTRICT', u'COMPANY_1', u'SHAPE_LEN_1', u'MOBILE_1', u'DESCRIPTION_1', u'REGION_1', u'DISTRICT_1', u'COMPANY_12', u'SHAPE_LEN_12', u'WORSTOFFENDER', u'SHAPE.AREA', u'SHAPE.LEN']

• PolyGeo: Did you try looking in the help for a tool using "delete field" as a search string? Once found, all tools have code examples that I think you should test and incorporate into your own efforts before posting your code snippet here.

Answer 1

Here's a pythonic way of removing the items containing underscores in a list.

field_names[:] = [x for x in field_names if not "_" in x]

Applying that for deletefield_management, which requires the fields to be deleted, and doing some work to turn the fields into strings:

field_list = arcpy.ListFields(fc)
field_list[:] = [x for x in field_list if "_" in x.name]
fields_to_delete = []
for item in field_list:
 fields_to_delete.append(item.name)
arcpy.DeleteField_management(fc, fields_to_delete)