Question

I have a Python list, say

l = [1,5,8] 

I want to write a SQL query to get the data for all the elements of the list, say

select name from students where id = |IN THE LIST l| 

How do I accomplish this?

Answer 1

Answers so far have been templating the values into a plain SQL string. That’s absolutely fine for integers, but if we wanted to do it for strings we get the escaping issue.

Here’s a variant using a parameterised query that would work for both:

placeholder= '?' # For SQLite. See DBAPI paramstyle. placeholders= ', '.join(placeholder for unused in l) query= 'SELECT name FROM students WHERE id IN (%s)' % placeholders cursor.execute(query, l)