How to get a single result from a SQL query in python?
Question:
Is there an elegant way of getting a single result from an SQLite SELECT query when using Python?
for example:
conn = sqlite3.connect('db_path.db')
cursor=conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT MAX(value) FROM table")
for row in cursor:
for elem in row:
maxVal = elem
is there a way to avoid those nested for
s and get the value directly? I’ve tried
maxVal = cursor[0][0]
without any success.
Answers:
I think you’re looking for Cursor.fetchone() :
cursor.fetchone()[0]
or you can try :
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM table where name='martin'")
Or you could write a wrapper function that, given SQL, returns a scalar result:
def get_scalar_result(conn, sql):
cursor=conn.cursor()
cursor.execute(sql)
return cursor.fetchone()[0]
I apologize for the possibly less than syntactically correct Python above, but I hope you get the idea.
If you’re not using pysqlite which has the built in cursor.fetchone
cursor.execute("select value from table order by value desc limit 1")
select count(*) from ... groupy by ...
returns None
instead of 0
,
so fetchone()[0]
would lead to an exception.
Therefore
def get_scalar_from_sql(sqlcur, sqlcmd):
# select count(*) from .... groupy by ... returns None instead of 0
sqlcur.execute(sqlcmd)
scalar = 0
tuple_or_None = sqlcur.fetchone()
if not tuple_or_None is None:
(scalar,) = tuple_or_None
return scalar
Sequence unpacking can be used to extract the scalar value from the result tuple.
By iterating over the cursor (or cursor.fetchall
)if there are multiple rows:
for result, in cursor:
print(result)
Or using cursor.fetchone
if there is a single row in the resultset:
result, = cur.fetchone()
print(result)
In both cases the trailing comma after result
unpacks the element from the single-element tuple. This is the same as the more commonly seen
a, b = (1, 2)
except the tuples only have one element:
a, = (1,)
Be careful, accepted answer might cause TypeError
!
Due to fetchone()
documentation:
Fetches the next row of a query result set, returning a single sequence, or None when no more data is available.
So with some SQL queries cursor.fetchone()[0]
could turn into None[0]
which leads to raising TypeError
exception.
Better way to get first row or None
is:
first_row = next(cursor, [None])[0]
If SQL query is empty, next
will use default value [None]
and get first element from that list without raising exceptions.
Is there an elegant way of getting a single result from an SQLite SELECT query when using Python?
for example:
conn = sqlite3.connect('db_path.db')
cursor=conn.cursor()
cursor.execute("SELECT MAX(value) FROM table")
for row in cursor:
for elem in row:
maxVal = elem
is there a way to avoid those nested for
s and get the value directly? I’ve tried
maxVal = cursor[0][0]
without any success.
I think you’re looking for Cursor.fetchone() :
cursor.fetchone()[0]
or you can try :
cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM table where name='martin'")
Or you could write a wrapper function that, given SQL, returns a scalar result:
def get_scalar_result(conn, sql):
cursor=conn.cursor()
cursor.execute(sql)
return cursor.fetchone()[0]
I apologize for the possibly less than syntactically correct Python above, but I hope you get the idea.
If you’re not using pysqlite which has the built in cursor.fetchone
cursor.execute("select value from table order by value desc limit 1")
select count(*) from ... groupy by ...
returns None
instead of 0
,
so fetchone()[0]
would lead to an exception.
Therefore
def get_scalar_from_sql(sqlcur, sqlcmd):
# select count(*) from .... groupy by ... returns None instead of 0
sqlcur.execute(sqlcmd)
scalar = 0
tuple_or_None = sqlcur.fetchone()
if not tuple_or_None is None:
(scalar,) = tuple_or_None
return scalar
Sequence unpacking can be used to extract the scalar value from the result tuple.
By iterating over the cursor (or cursor.fetchall
)if there are multiple rows:
for result, in cursor:
print(result)
Or using cursor.fetchone
if there is a single row in the resultset:
result, = cur.fetchone()
print(result)
In both cases the trailing comma after result
unpacks the element from the single-element tuple. This is the same as the more commonly seen
a, b = (1, 2)
except the tuples only have one element:
a, = (1,)
Be careful, accepted answer might cause TypeError
!
Due to fetchone()
documentation:
Fetches the next row of a query result set, returning a single sequence, or None when no more data is available.
So with some SQL queries cursor.fetchone()[0]
could turn into None[0]
which leads to raising TypeError
exception.
Better way to get first row or None
is:
first_row = next(cursor, [None])[0]
If SQL query is empty, next
will use default value [None]
and get first element from that list without raising exceptions.