Question

I have been learning to use sqlite3 with python. Right now, I have a function that takes a word and looks up the definition of that word on the internet. I then try to store the word in one table and the definitions into another table linked together by a foreign-key.

Like this:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import mechanize
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup
import sys
import sqlite3

def dictionary(word):
    br = mechanize.Browser()
    response = br.open('http://www.dictionary.reference.com')
    br.select_form(nr=0)
    br.form['q'] = word 
    br.submit()
    definition = BeautifulSoup(br.response().read())
    trans = definition.findAll('td',{'class':'td3n2'})
    fin = [i.text for i in trans]
    query = {}
    word_count = 1
    def_count = 1
    for i in fin: 
        query[fin.index(i)] = i
    con = sqlite3.connect('vocab.db')
    with con:
        spot = con.cursor()
        spot.execute("SELECT * FROM Words")
        rows = spot.fetchall()
        for row in rows:
            word_count += 1
        spot.execute("INSERT INTO Words VALUES(?,?)", word_count,word)
        spot.execute("SELECT * FROM Definitions")
        rows = spot.fetchall()
        for row in rows:
            def_count += 1
        for q in query:
            spot.execute("INSERT INTO Definitions VALUES(?,?,?)", def_count,q,word_count)
    return query

print dictionary(sys.argv[1]) 

When I run it:

./database_trial.py 'pass'

This is the error message:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "./database_trial.py", line 37, in <module>
    print dictionary(sys.argv[1])  
  File "./database_trial.py", line 28, in dictionary
    spot.execute("INSERT INTO Words VALUES(?,?)", word_count,word)
TypeError: function takes at most 2 arguments (3 given)

Inside the function I only have two arguments being passed to the ‘Words’ table but, the message says there are three?

spot.execute("INSERT INTO Words VALUES(?,?)", word_count,word) 

I’m thought I might be messing something up with sys.argv. So I went through and change that line to:

spot.execute("INSERT INTO Words VALUES(?,?)", word_count, sys.argv[1])

I still got the same results with the error message?

Answer 1

spot.execute("INSERT INTO Words VALUES(?,?)", word_count,word) 

There are three arguments being passed to the method spot.execute: the SQL string, the variable word_count, and the variable word. I suspect the values to enter into the database need to be enclosed in a tuple to form a single argument:

spot.execute("INSERT INTO Words VALUES(?,?)", (word_count,word))