Question

Here is my code (currently):

conn = sqlite3.connect(db)
conn.text_factory = str  #bugger 8-bit bytestrings
cur = conn.cursor()

reader = csv.reader(open(csvfile, "rU"), delimiter = '\t')
for Number, Name, Message, Datetime, Type in reader:

# populate subscriber table
if str(Number)[0] == '1': # errors on this line
  tmpNumber = str(Number)[1:]
  Number = int(tmpNumber)
cur.execute('INSERT OR IGNORE INTO subscriber (name, phone_number) VALUES (?,?)', (Name, Number))

cur.close()
conn.close()

It returns this error on the line commented to indicate where the error lies:

IndexError: string index out of range

All of the numbers have values, but if the phone number starts with a 1 I want to remove the 1 before inserting it into the database. Why won’t this work? I’ve converted it to a string before trying to reference the first character, so I don’t understand why this isn’t working.

Answer 1

Seems like you are getting an empty string. Try replacing your if statement with the following and see if it works.

if str(Number).startswith('1'):

(Edited to reflect @kindall ‘s suggestion of using startswith instead of slicing [:1]).