Question

i’m trying to use an IN statement to return results which match one of a list of strings

for example

strings = ['string1', 'string2', 'string3']
c.execute('select count(*) from table where foo in ?', strings)

i know this is incorrect and doesnt work but i hope that it highlights what im trying to do…

Answer 1

You can’t do that. There are three problems:

• You can’t have a table called table unless you use backticks around the table name.
• An IN clause must have parentheses.
• You want three parameters, not one.

Try this instead:

sql = 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM yourtable WHERE foo IN (?, ?, ?)'

If the number of strings is variable, use this instead:

params = ','.join('?' for x in strings)
sql = 'SELECT COUNT(*) FROM yourtable WHERE foo IN (' + params + ')'