Question

I’m in the process of transferring my brain from PHP + MySQL to Python and at the moment I’m using sqlite as an intermediary to something else later because it’s built in.

When I try to set up an initial database to work with, it throws an error on the INSERT statement that INSERTs multiple rows:

import sqlite3

query = """CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS "users" (
             "userID" INTEGER PRIMARY KEY autoincrement,
             "email" varchar(255) NOT NULL,
             "forename" varchar(50) NOT NULL,
             "surname" varchar(50) NOT NULL
           );
           INSERT INTO "users" ("userID", "email", "forename", "surname") 
           VALUES
             (1, '[e-mail]', 'Test', 'User'),
             (2, '[e-mail]', 'Test', 'User');"""

 db_conn = sqlite3.connect('test.db')
 try:
     db_conn.cursor().executescript(query)
     db_conn.commit()
 except:
     print "error with database"
     raise
 finally:
     db_conn.close()

When I run it, I get:

error with database
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "dbTest.py", line 20, in <module>
    db_conn.cursor().executescript(query)
sqlite2.OperationalError: near ",": syntax error

It took me quite a while to find exactly which “,” it didn’t like (I mean, really? SQL errors suck!). It is indeed the “,” separating INSERT rows.

What stupid thing did I do?

Answer 1

For your insert I would use .executemany() instead of execute script, if you can. Otherwise if you can’t, your INSERT statement will need to be seperate for each VALUES set you wish to pass it.

query = """INSERT INTO "users" ("userID", "email", "forename", "surname") 
           VALUES
           (?, ?, ?, ?)
        """
user_list = ((1, '[e-mail]', 'Test', 'User'), (2, '[e-mail]', 'Test', 'User'))
cursor.executemany("INSERT INTO myTable(data) values (?) ", user_list)

EDIT:
According to this post, you can in fact have multiple value sets in a single INSERT statement, but the syntax is far from pretty.