Deleting row with cursor in ArcPy?

Question

I am trying to delete field names where the field "FULL_NAME" = 1.

What am I doing wrong here?

I am not getting an error message, but nothing is being deleted from my file. I am not sure why the delete field isn't working.

import arcpy
roads = "C:/hwy"
cursor = arcpy.da.UpdateCursor(roads, ["FULL_NAME"]) 
for row in cursor:
 row[0] == "1": 
 cursor.deleteRow()
del row
del cursor

• Michael Stimson: Try using a with block for your cursor. Is your feature class participating in a topology or geometric network? Is your FULL_NAME a text field or numeric? if it's numeric you will need to specify if row[0] == 1: (no quotes) C:/hwy doesn't look like a feature class name, should it be c:/hwy.shp?
• Dan: Wouldn't creating a feature layer and feeding that into a DeleteFeatures be more efficient?
• Aaron: Is the field containing 1 a string or integer field?
• user10720: 1 is a string the hwy is actually in a geodatabase I just simplified the naming for the demo
• Aaron: I would be interested in seeing a benchmark on the DeleteFeatures method vs the UpdateCursor approach.

Answer 1

Instead of:

 row[0] == "1": 
 cursor.deleteRow()

try this:

 if row[0] == "1": 
 cursor.deleteRow()

• user10720: This did not change anything
• Aaron: @user10720 Try refreshing your table to see if the changes took effect.
• Aaron: Great, two things: 1) consider wrapping your cursor in a with statement as you see in the documentation (pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/arcpy/data-access/…) and 2) please consider accepting @PolyGeo's answer so we can consider this question resolved.