title: find and replace characters in a particular column in a table using python
body: <p>I have a 67 different tables (with hundreds of thousands of rows) with multiple columns. One column is named PARCEL_ID. The PARCEL_ID field has characters like "-" or space or "/", etc. I would like to remove all these "-", or empty space, or "/", etc characters from the PARCEL_ID field from all the tables in a folder.  The tables are dbf files. I want to get the PARCEL_ID column values like "04-2N-07-00 00-0001-0000" to this "042N07000000010000". Basically get rid of empty spaces and dashes and any other character that i dont want in there. How do I do that using python? This is what I am trying unsuccesfully:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import arcpy
  import re
  arcpy.env.workspace = r'C:\Workspace\PARCELS_2012\Nal_dbf_test'
  
  fcs = arcpy.ListTables()
  
  s = ['PARCEL_ID']
  
  for fc in fcs:
      print "** Now working on "+fc
      fields = arcpy.ListFields(fc)
      for field in fields:
          if field.baseName in s:
              PARCEL_ID = re.sub(r'[-/ ]', '', PARCEL_ID)
              print "   Parcelno cleaned"
              if not field.baseName in s:
                  print "   Already clean"
  print fc + " is cleaned."
  </code></pre>