Empty output generated when importing CSV to geodatabase

Question

I got Warning 000117 - Warning empty output generated while trying to import a CSV to the ArcGIS Pro geodatabase. I have cleaned the file to remove obvious problems -- changing NA and NaN cells to 0 and removing all special characters from field names. I still get Warning 000117. I've also tried using a short version of the same file -- a few thousand record instead of 500,000 records -- with the same result.

File has 18 columns: one text (coerced from numeric) and the rest double. Field names are: BLOCK2020, Totpop, NHWhite, NHBlack, NHAmInd, NHAsian, NHPacIsl, NHOther, NHMulti, Hispanic, HUTotal, HUOcc, HUVac, NHWhitePer, NHBlackPer, NHAsianPer, HispanicPer, and NonWhitePer.

Note: I want to import directly to the geodatabase rather than to a folder so I can specify the datatype of the BLOCK2020 field. If I import it through the folder, the Block comes in as numeric, and several states with leading zeroes in their block ID's have to be manually corrected after import - a huge pain.

• FelixIP: It will also make text field 8000 ! Long. Go through Access perhaps

Answer 1

Partial answer: The default length for text columns is 8. I changed it to the actual length of the census block ID, 15, and the import worked. But although I specified text, Arc truncated leading zeroes from the block ID.

• Rex: Try creating a fake record for the first row of the csv and make sure the block ID (and/or other string fields) has letters it in 'ABCD'. That way the importer never sees that column as as anything but a string (even though you specified it already).