Something that I learned as good practice is working with copies of my shapefiles and not the originals.  When doing this you do create several temporary tables and/or shapefiles and these need to be cleaned up.

## System arguments
 # Input Streets shapefile
 Streets = sys.argv[1]
 # Output Streets shapefile
 Streets_output = sys.argv[2]
 # Output Streets shapefile
 Streets_output2 = sys.argv[3]
 # facility streets layer
 facilstr = sys.argv[5]

# Set the workspace for the processing files
 gp.workspace = os.path.dirname(sys.argv[2])

# Make copies so that processing doesn't take place on the original.
 gp.AddMessage("\nCreating processing files...")
 gp.Copy_management(Streets, "Streets_process.shp")
 gp.Copy_management(facilstr, "facilstreets.shp")
 gp.AddMessage ("Copies created")

This creates copies of the input shapefiles which I then use for processing.  Because there are these temp files, in the end of the script I need to delete those temp files.  For this you need to import the “os” and “glob” functions such as import os, glob in the beginning of the script.  Then at the end of the script we use these functions to clean up the temp files.  I also cleanup the xml files that are created when working with temporary tables.

gp.AddMessage("Cleanup...")
 # Delete "process" files

for file in glob.glob(gp.workspace+"/Streets_process*"):
 os.remove(file)
 for file in glob.glob(gp.workspace+"/facilstreets*"):
 os.remove(file)
 for file in glob.glob(gp.workspace+"/*.xml"):
 os.remove(file)
 gp.AddMessage("\nDone.\n")

Another process that I though would be quite simple was merging 2 shapefiles.  It seems there is an issue with the shapefile names not being recognized and I had to use “str” to identify the names as strings.

temp1 = "temp1.shp"
 temp2 = "temp2.shp"

strlist = str(temp1)+";"+str(temp2)
 outshp = (gp.workspace+"/final.shp")
 gp.Merge_management (str(strlist), outshp)
 gp.AddMessage ("Merged Shapefiles")

When I tried to just use the names of the shapefile copies I could not get this to work.  I then created a simple list and identified the shapefile names as strings as well as in the actual Merge_managment, I had to identify the strlist as string.

BR

I have had the need to join tables to a shapefile or feature class many times and after not finding anything on the web, I posted on the ESRI forum and got my solution.

The difference with joining a table is that it is a one way join.  That is, you can copy from the table to the feature but not the other way around.

gp.MakeFeatureLayer("temp.shp", "temp")
 joinTable = "temp2.dbf"
 gp.AddJoin_management("temp", "field 1", joinTable, "field 1")
 gp.CalculateField_management("temp", "Field_2", "[temp2.Field_2]")
 gp.RemoveJoin_management("temp", "temp2.dbf")

I originally tried making a tableview of the table but found that it wasn’t necessary to do so.  Notice that because it is a table, tou need the [] around the table that is being read from.

I find this function very useful as I often have the need to read from a table and copy values over to a shapefile.

In this instance I needed to join a table to a table.  The first table  (table 1) was an input table and the second table (table 2) was a copy of the .dbf from a shapefile.

gp.AddMessage("Making Layer & View...")
 # Make Feature Layer from Stops
 gp.Copy_management(sys.argv[3], "temp.dbf")
 gp.MakeTableView_management("temp2.dbf", "temp2")
 joinTable1 = "temp.dbf"
 joinTable2 = "temp2"
 gp.AddJoin_management(joinTable1, "field_1", joinTable2, "field_2")
 gp.AddMessage("Joined table views")
 gp.CalculateField_management("temp2", "TIME", "[temp.TIME]")
 gp.RemoveJoin_management("temp2", "temp.dbf")