Question

I am trying to get a single cell of values from MySQLdb, in Python. Here’s my code:

fname = c.execute("""SELECT fname from employees WHERE user = %s;""", (useruname))

However what I get is “1L”, which is not what I want – fname should contain a string, not a long integer.

Why would it do this?

Answer 1

The method execute “returns long integer rows affected, if any”.

To get the value of fname, you need to fetch the results using for example fetchall or fetchone:

cursor.execute("""SELECT fname from employees WHERE user = %s""", (useruname,))
row = cursor.fetchone()
print row[0]