Question

I’m having some trouble with the datetime format with Python/MySQL.

I calculate the datetime using the following script (fed by a Python dictionary):

tempDate  = str(eachday.get("date").get("year")).zfill(4) + "-" + 
str(eachday.get("date").get("month")).zfill(2) + "-" + 
str(eachday.get("date").get("day")).zfill(2)   + " " + 
str(eachday.get("date").get("hour")).zfill(2)  + ":" + 
str(eachday.get("date").get("min")).zfill(2)   + ":" + 
str(eachday.get("date").get("sec")).zfill(2)

Which yields a value that looks like 2012-04-02 04:04:23.

I can insert into MySQL without any problems.

sql.execute("""INSERT INTO `db`.`table`(`id`, `fk_id`, `time`, `field1`, `field2`) VALUES (NULL, %s, %s, %s, %s);""", (fk_value, tempDate, value1, value2)) 
DB_CONN.commit()

But when I try to delete anything with that datetime,

sql.execute("""DELETE FROM `db`.`table` WHERE `time` = "%s";""", (tempDate))
DB_CONN.commit()

it returns a warning about an incorrect datetime value:

Warning: Incorrect datetime value: ''2012-07-17 23:00:00'' for column 'time' at row 1

How can I delete by datetime in Python? This is especially confusing since inserting the same variable (nothing changed) works perfectly.

Answer 1

You can’t include the quotes in "%s" in the query string; the mysqldb module adds them for you (same as it does in your INSERT where you don’t try to put quotes around the values…)