How to merge a list of dbf tables into one in Python?

Question

I want to merge a lot of dbf tables in my "Output" folder, into one table. Here is my code, but it doesn't work (error showed below).:

import arcpy     
import os

arcpy.env.workspace="C:\\Users\\Desktop\\Betty\\Output"
listTable = arcpy.ListTables ()
arcpy.Merge_management (listTable, 'C:\\Users\\Desktop\\Betty\\Output\\ppt.dbf')
print "done!"

Traceback (most recent call last): File "C:\Users\caobaijing\Desktop\Betty\Python\MergeTables.py", line 7, in arcpy.Merge_management (listTable, "C:\Users\caobaijing\Desktop\Betty\Output\ppt.dbf") File "C:\Program Files (x86)\ArcGIS\Desktop10.1\arcpy\arcpy\management.py", line 3762, in Merge raise e ExecuteError: Failed to execute. Parameters are not valid. ERROR 000732: Input Datasets: Dataset **does not exist or is not supported Failed to execute (Merge).

Answer 1

The above answer didn't work for me, listTable kept coming back with a blank result. Using ListFiles with a *.dbf wildcard did the trick.

I used filezilla to download a bunch of zipped shapefiles from ftp://ftp2.census.gov/geo/tiger/TIGER2014/PLACEEC/

I uncompressed them into a single directory (C:/Temp) so that all shapefiles were in one folder. I have 7-zip, so I just selected all the zip files, right click -> 7-zip -> extract here.

import arcpy
arcpy.env.workspace = "C:/Temp"
files = arcpy.ListFiles ( "*.dbf")
arcpy.Merge_management ( files, "C:/Temp/output.dbf" )

I opened the output.dbf in excel, I had all my data together.

Answer 2

Given a folder with dbf files, merge all of them into a df:

    import pandas as pd
    from simpledbf import Dbf5
    import glob

    # list all files
    path = r'./dbf_folder/'
    files = glob.glob(path + "\*.dbf")

    # init empty df
    merge = pd.DataFrame()

    for file in files:    
        # load dbf into pandas df
        df = Dbf5(file).to_dataframe()

        # append df
        merge = merge.append(
          df, ignore_index=True)

    # save to excel?
    #merge.to_excel(r'Merge.xlsx', index=False)