Question

I have been developing a small application in Python using the Web.py framework that does some simple PostgreSQL queries. I have noticed that the returned value contains a whole bunch of stuff which encapsulates the actual raw data.

The following code is supposed to query the value of name from the table todo

name = db.query("SELECT name FROM todo;")

but when I call…

return name[0]

The following is returned/printed…

<Storage {'name': u'Learn web.py'}>

The data is correct, the value is “Learn web.py”, but I was wondering if it was possible to just get the raw data, “Learn web.py” instead of all the other stuff. I could parse it, but I was wondering if there was a more correct way like name.rawdata() function that I am missing? I have tried name[1] which is “out-of-bounds”.

Answer 1

name[0].name

The [0] selects the first row from the result. The .name gets the name column from the row.

Additionally, rather than using db.query with a raw SQL string, I’d use db.select:

names = db.select('todo', what='name')

See the documentation for more information.