I have to often get a table structure for a feature class or table into either a spreadsheet or word processing document. There might be an easy way to do this in ArcGIS 10 but I haven’t found it. So, as is my nature, I decided to roll my own. This is a bare-bones script that iterates through the fields, printing the field name, type, width, and precision. There are three optional features to it:

UPDATE: After receiving a request to modify the code to ignore .lock files, I have an updated to this post. One of the tasks I’ve been automating is publishing a weekly data update to a website. The update consists of shapefile. The trouble with shapefiles is they consist of 3 or more files with the same basename but different extensions in the same directory. Not an overly complicated situation but a common one that ArcGIS does not have a solution out-of-the-box.