Question

I’m doing a task for uni, where we take a text file with a list of student IDs and their favourite movies, games, tv shows, et cetera, and populating a MySQL database with it. The text files are formatted like so:

1   Fight Club
1   Pootie Tang
3   The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy
3   Ocean's Eleven
3   The Italian Job
4   Apocalypse Now
4   Black Hawk Down
4   Full Metal Jacket
4   Platoon
4   Star Wars Series
4   Stargate
4   The Crow

and the database table (popularity) is this:

studentnumber (int)
category      (varchar)
value         (varchar)

My code for doing all this is as follows:

import MySQLdb

def open_connection():
    '''Returns the database object'''
    connection = MySQLdb.connect(host='localhost',
                                 user='root',
                                 passwd='inb104',
                                 db='inb104')
    return connection


def process_file(category, cursor):
    '''opens the relavent file, then for each entry, runs a query to insert it
    into the database'''
    words = open(category + '.txt', 'rU')
    entries_list = []

    for line in words:
        split_line = line.split()
        number = str(split_line[0])
        value = str(split_line[1])
        entries_list.append((number, category, value))

    cursor.executemany('''INSERT INTO popularity
                          VALUES (%s, %s, $s)''', entries_list)


def data_entry(categories):
    '''
    Adds data from each category in a list of categories into a MySQL
    database.  A text file exists for each category in the list.

    categories is a list of category strings.
    '''
    connection = open_connection()
    cursor = connection.cursor()

    #process the file
    for item in categories:
        process_file(item, cursor)

if __name__ == '__main__':
data_entry(['movies', 'sports', 'actors', 'tv', 'games', \
            'activities', 'musicians', 'books'])

The problem I’m having is that no matter what I do, I keep getting the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\Uni\INB104\portfolio2\data_entry\data_entry_q.py", line 96, in <module>
    'activities', 'musicians', 'books'])
  File "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\Uni\INB104\portfolio2\data_entry\data_entry_q.py", line 78, in data_entry
    process_file(item, cursor)
  File "\\vmware-host\Shared Folders\Uni\INB104\portfolio2\data_entry\data_entry_q.py", line 63, in process_file
    VALUES (%s, %s, $s)''', entries_list)
  File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\MySQLdb\cursors.py", line 212, in executemany
    self.errorhandler(self, TypeError, msg)
  File "C:\Python25\Lib\site-packages\MySQLdb\connections.py", line 35, in defaulterrorhandler
    raise errorclass, errorvalue
TypeError: not all arguments converted during string formatting

I have no idea how to fix this (even after extensive googling), and I can’t change from MySQLdb because it’s a uni task (personally, i’d be using sqlalchemy). If anyone can help it’s be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,
Tom

Answer 1

Its must be the typo, remove the $ and replace it with %

Error code:

cursor.executemany('''INSERT INTO popularity
      VALUES (%s, %s, $s)''', entries_list)

Corrected code:

cursor.executemany('''INSERT INTO popularity
      VALUES (%s, %s, %s)''', entries_list)