Using directory names starting with number in ArcPy?

Question

I have a script to export DDP extents to tif and when I change

arcpy.mapping.ExportToTIFF(mxd,"tests\BA\BA10k_" + str(ddp.pageRow.PageName) + ".tif",df,9306,9306*ar,1800,True)

to

arcpy.mapping.ExportToTIFF(mxd,"tests\BA10円k\BA10k_" + str(ddp.pageRow.PageName) + ".tif",df,9306,9306*ar,1800,True)

--added "10k" to the directory I get

Exporting page 1 of 760 Traceback (most recent call last): File "P:2012円183円_TownPlanning_Symbology\Working\Raster_Layer_Creation\DDP_GeoTiff_production_BA.py", line 10, in arcpy.mapping.ExportToTIFF(mxd,"tests\BA10円k\BA10k_" + str(ddp.pageRow.PageName) + ".tif",df,9306,9306*ar,1800,True) File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.1\arcpy\arcpy\utils.py", line 181, in fn_ return fn(*args, **kw) File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.1\arcpy\arcpy\mapping.py", line 1373, in ExportToTIFF layout.exportToTIFF(*args) AttributeError: DataFrameObject: Error in executing ExportToTIFF

Any ideas on why?

Answer 1

\ is an escape character in Python.

You will need to either:

• Escape each \ with another \
• Put an r before the opening quote to denote it as a raw string
• Change each \ to a /

---

Your symptom of seeing that it seemed to "work without the '\' except if a number was the first character of the directory name" is probably because they weren't valid escape sequences and it was falling back to the literal interpretation. 0円, 1円, 2円 .. 7円, are octal numbers which are translated into ASCII characters, thus mangling your pathnames. More info here: http://docs.python.org/reference/lexical_analysis.html#string-literals